The Climate Change Bill That Wasn't
July 26th 2010 12:32
The Senate has given up on passing climate change legislation, which really isn’t a victory for anybody except people who don’t want congress to do anything at all. The obvious fact is that change is coming, the same change that would be coming if a cap and trade bill had been passed, but it will just take a little bit longer, and be harder to achieve.
The long term goal of an energy bill should be a future without fuel. Then planet offers lots of energy that can be harnessed, wind power, solar energy, tidal power and geothermal energy, but our technology isn’t up to the job of replacing all our current energy sources with these methods. Beyond that, all natural energy sources would have to be stored as electricity, and storage becomes a problem as well. We’ll be burning hydrocarbons well into the future. The question is, which hydrocarbons will it be? There’s still lots of oil, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to get. Some of it is in regions that are politically unstable, or else its in places that are geologically inconvenient. Kazakhstan, the world’s fourth fastest growing oil exporter, is raising taxes on oil exports, following Russia in demanding more control over its natural resources. The ultra-deep wells in the Gulf of Mexico are clear evidence that the easy to reach oil has peaked. The largest reserves are in the form of heavy oil which is more difficult to refine. On July 25th, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez threatened to cut off oil sales to the United States.
Meanwhile, the United States has plenty of natural gas – enough to serve as a bridge fuel until there is more progress in developing fuel-free energy resources. While the natural gas is trapped in shale deposits, and the extraction methods are far from clean, shale extraction compares favorably with coal mining. While Congress is funding research into carbon dioxide sequestration in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal, natural gas produces far less carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels.
Politically, natural gas deposits are found in traditional energy producing states, so that members of Congress can get behind the development of natural gas production without taking major political hits. Exxon-Mobile, which has a history of funding efforts to question the ideas of climate change, has made a $26 billion purchase of XTO, the second largest natural gas producer in the United States. The technology for converting natural gas to a motor fuel is already available.
Again, natural gas is not a clean fuel, and extraction has risks. While the nation was focused on the BP oil blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, there was a shale gas blow-out in Pennsylvania. The importance of natural gas is not that it’s good – it’s not – but that it’s better than what we have now. Increased use of natural gas reduces the need for even dirtier fuels, improves the United States balance of trade, frees us from reliance on unstable governments, and promotes industrial growth. The size of the Exxon-Mobile investment seems like evidence that they’ve reached the conclusion that there’s a future in it, and Exxon’s position in natural gas has been credited with moderating the company’s stock price decline when BP was dragging down the entire industry.
By passing a climate change bill, congress had the chance to direct an orderly transition, so that those companies and industries which could make the transition most easily could go first. Instead, we’ll have a transition determined by the need to drill for oil at extreme depths, nationalization of resources by foreign governments, and increasing evidence of climate change. Ignoring the future doesn’t make it go away, it just makes it harder to get there.
The long term goal of an energy bill should be a future without fuel. Then planet offers lots of energy that can be harnessed, wind power, solar energy, tidal power and geothermal energy, but our technology isn’t up to the job of replacing all our current energy sources with these methods. Beyond that, all natural energy sources would have to be stored as electricity, and storage becomes a problem as well. We’ll be burning hydrocarbons well into the future. The question is, which hydrocarbons will it be? There’s still lots of oil, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to get. Some of it is in regions that are politically unstable, or else its in places that are geologically inconvenient. Kazakhstan, the world’s fourth fastest growing oil exporter, is raising taxes on oil exports, following Russia in demanding more control over its natural resources. The ultra-deep wells in the Gulf of Mexico are clear evidence that the easy to reach oil has peaked. The largest reserves are in the form of heavy oil which is more difficult to refine. On July 25th, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez threatened to cut off oil sales to the United States.
Meanwhile, the United States has plenty of natural gas – enough to serve as a bridge fuel until there is more progress in developing fuel-free energy resources. While the natural gas is trapped in shale deposits, and the extraction methods are far from clean, shale extraction compares favorably with coal mining. While Congress is funding research into carbon dioxide sequestration in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal, natural gas produces far less carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels.
Politically, natural gas deposits are found in traditional energy producing states, so that members of Congress can get behind the development of natural gas production without taking major political hits. Exxon-Mobile, which has a history of funding efforts to question the ideas of climate change, has made a $26 billion purchase of XTO, the second largest natural gas producer in the United States. The technology for converting natural gas to a motor fuel is already available.
Again, natural gas is not a clean fuel, and extraction has risks. While the nation was focused on the BP oil blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, there was a shale gas blow-out in Pennsylvania. The importance of natural gas is not that it’s good – it’s not – but that it’s better than what we have now. Increased use of natural gas reduces the need for even dirtier fuels, improves the United States balance of trade, frees us from reliance on unstable governments, and promotes industrial growth. The size of the Exxon-Mobile investment seems like evidence that they’ve reached the conclusion that there’s a future in it, and Exxon’s position in natural gas has been credited with moderating the company’s stock price decline when BP was dragging down the entire industry.
By passing a climate change bill, congress had the chance to direct an orderly transition, so that those companies and industries which could make the transition most easily could go first. Instead, we’ll have a transition determined by the need to drill for oil at extreme depths, nationalization of resources by foreign governments, and increasing evidence of climate change. Ignoring the future doesn’t make it go away, it just makes it harder to get there.
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