Truly, really, it’s not my intention to keep blogging about Sarah Palin. She produced an opinion piece for WaPo on Sunday, however, that radiates clarity about the evils of cap-and-trade – and that reminds me how unique she is in eschewing ritual obeisance to political correctness.
Her piece is refreshing because it doesn’t make formulaic references to either “conservation” or “investing in alternative energy sources.” The jury hasn’t even started deliberation on the proximate meaning of a finite supply of fossil fuel resources; rather, the world’s proven reserves continue to expand exponentially every 30 years, as technological improvements lead to better surveying techniques, and to increased capacity to access reserves. Meanwhile, government investment in alternative energy has yet to achieve anything other than creating new taxpayer-funded dependencies – along with distorting world food prices, among other unintended consequences of boresighted policy.
What Palin does focus on is the economic damage that would be done by making American production cost significantly more than it does abroad, by driving jobs out of the US, and by sticking the poor and middle class with “skyrocketing” (Obama’s word) utility bills, and fuel bills performing the same gyrations. These are the economic “biggies,” in a nutshell.
She straightforwardly advocates drilling into our proven reserves, expanding our use of coal, and going after the vast sources of fuel under our Western states, which include shale oil and tar sands. The significant feature of these approaches is that private industry is fully prepared to fund every penny of the infrastructure and R&D – because these fuel processes can be expected to be profitable, unlike wind, solar, and biofuels. She also points out the always-available option of nuclear power generation.
I would add something she doesn’t address, which is the intrusive, anti-libertarian nature of the elements of the Smart Grid envisioned by Waxman-Markey for private homes and businesses. I’m all for an updated power grid, but utility customers need to retain their economic power – and liberty – to exert demand against it at their discretion, with the price of the service being their decision criterion. A grid that effectively doesn’t offer that feature is, in fact, a Stupid Grid, one that would stifle the incentives of economic liberty and create whole new galaxies of opportunity for political graft, corruption, and favoritism.
And I do quibble with the endlessly-repeated mantra of “energy independence,” which Palin invokes here, as literally everyone else does. It’s already the case that Saudi Arabia and OPEC can’t hold us over a barrel, energy-wise. They’re not our major fuel suppliers, nor does OPEC have the power today to jack up prices beyond what non-OPEC producers are willing to agree to, or hurt the US as it did in the 1970s by refusing to sell to us. If Canada and Mexico get smart with us – well, I’m betting they won’t.
The reason we should want to drill for and refine our own fuel is that we can bring energy costs and prices down by doing that. We also create much less pollution and environmental havoc with our drilling and refining methods than do Russia, China, India, or Mexico.
The “energy independence” mantra is usually invoked with an air of anti-trade populism, and that is not a posture beneficial to the American consumer or the economy as a whole. Our international fiscal problem is debt, not trade.
Nor are we engaged in the Middle East “because we need their oil.” There are a number of interlocking reasons why we are engaged there, and although oil is one of them, the national security issue is not whether we can buy oil from Middle Eastern nations, but whether oil can be bought freely by everyone, from Middle Eastern nations. That issue matters directly and significantly to the world trade in oil, and to our network of alliances. Our allies want diversity in their fuel sources, and the seller competition it brings; and it is greatly to our advantage to see that they have it, lest they be turned against us by extortion from the aspiring oil/gas monopolists in Moscow and Beijing.
But tapping our own resources more effectively would bring down global energy prices, and benefit Americans tremendously. In that, Palin is absolutely right. Good on her for making the point, minus the reflexive bromides we get from even guys like Romney and Huckabee.
Comments 13
And I was thinking that it has long been the policy of the US that we never wanted, for military reasons, to exhaust our own reserves before exhausting the rest of the world’s.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:43 pm
fuster, we’d have to work real, real, real hard to exhaust our coal and natural gas reserves anytime soon.
Oil appears more vulnerable to depletion, but, as JED points out, estimates of reserves have a way of becoming obsolete by the time they’re published – one of the problems, reminiscent of the lack of a clear picture of national and global finances that RCAR is always complaining about, is that virtually all of the authoritative-sounding estimates you hear about how much oil might be recovered offshore are based on 30- to 40-yeard old estimates that have, on occasion, been shown to be way, way off.
If the technical and environmental problems related to exploiting oil shale could be resolved satisfactorily – not a certainty – they are estimated to contain the equivalent of 5 times the entire oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:34 am
The important thing to know about oil reserves is that their ultimate size no longer matters except at the economic margin. We now know how to generate sufficient electricity with nuclear, wind and solar to power our civilization, and the technology to turn coal into liquid fuels was perfected in the 1940′s.
It’s true that these sources (except nuclear) cost two or three or more times what our current energy sources cost, and wind on a civilization powering scale would disfigure the environment worse than strip mining does; but the technologies clearly exist and they can be priced reasonably accurately.
So the precise date of peak oil is not as big a deal as is made out. As peak oil approaches the price of oil will rise to the level of the existing alternatives and the profit incentives to proliferate them will become immense. Fifty years after peak oil petroleum will be the a marginal but important and very expensive product used to specialty applications, like whale oil is today.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:50 am
As regards peak oil, there may never BE a peak. I am referring to the controversial topic of abiogenetic oil, i.e., oil not produced by pyrolysis of kerogen, the waxy compound produced by anaerobic bacteria acting for eons on the corpses of zooplankta. In the conventional, biogenetic theory of petroleum formation kerogen is transformed into the paraffins, olefins, and naphthenes that are refined into gasoline, diesel, et cetera. In fact, the abiogenetic theory, if true, would suggest that the conventional theory, which is and has been for some time now taught from grade school up, is false.
Abiogenetic oil is, so the theory maintains, a product of serpentinization (serpentine is a kind of rock) of material from the deep mantle of the earth that makes it way to within a few miles of the surface, obviously does not depend on decomposition of prior living organisms, and has been going on more or less since the Proteozoic aeon (about 2.5 billion years ago). On this theory there cannot BE be a practical limit to the amount of oil yet to be discovered, hence no such thing as “peak oil.”
Abiogenesis of petroleum, in its modern form, goes back to von Humboldt in the 19th century; but the theory, which, to be candid, is rejected by a sizable majority of petroleum-formation “experts,” in 1951 received encouragement from the work of N.E. Kudryatsev, later, Thomas Gold, co-creator with Fred Hoyle of steady-state cosmology, who died in 2004.
The main problem with the theory as regards proving or controverting it is the near impossibility of performing controlled experiments/investigations at the depths predicted for abiogenetic formation. Stil, the currenty accepted model has some serious weaknesses of which the general public is almost entirely ignorant.
Abiogenesis suggests an alternative to peak-oil and eventual-depletion alarmism, which, to be honest, certainly underpins much discussion of oil policy. As with anthropogenic global warming, much of the argument MAY BE a dispute over a fictitious account of what oil is and how it got there.
July 15th, 2009 at 7:53 am
So Sarah Palin is using the her bully pulpit to advocate a sensible energy policy. Good for her. At least she’s not as tediously ecumenical as Newt Gingrich, whose film (with the beautifully plastic Callista) “We’ve Got the Power” is making the rounds at conservative kaffeeklatsches. Different energy sources are clearly more efficient for specific uses, so it’s dumb to say, “We have all these alternatives” when the alternatives are completely impractical (uneconomic) for certain high-demand uses.
Quite apart from the superstructure of the legal requirements of Waxman-Markey is the less discussed legal environment that it creates that will strip, one lawsuit at a time, property from ordinary people. It will create yet another playground for litigious environmentalist groups, not to mention the Gov’t itself, to hamstring enterprise and deny free commerce.
July 15th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Brava Sarah! Almost as startling as reading her clear and succinct summary of the alternatives before us was perusing the comments directed at her opinion in the Post. Usually I skip ‘em because, well, they are usually very skippable. No matter how persuasively or insightfully an opinion might be presented by the paper’s conservative-minded columnists such as Will and Krauthammer the response is overwhelmingly nasty and jejeune.
The response to Palin’s piece was amazingly balanced. Of course there was the usual rubbish, for example, the complaint that though 100 scientists recently insisted that theories of “CO2-driven climate change” are largely fraudulent, “100,000 scientists” actively researching the subject agree that “climate change” is a reality. Notice the completely un-ironic and blockheaded equation of “climate change” which no one disputes – you’d have to be an imbecile to deny it – with anthropogenic climate change, as if they were as alike as two peas in a pod. AGW may not meet the legal definition of a fraud, but at the same time it does not meet the scientific definition of a theory, which is to say, a set of hypotheses that is more or less regularly borne out by the dat. As presently proffered, it is hogwash and has been falsified in countless ways.
The sort of ignorant, hence ignorable, irrelevant assertion is so common on the left and so ineradicable that one does begin to wonder if there is an active conspiracy afoot to confuse matters. The talking points cited in support of AGW by the left-wing blogosphere have been robotically cut and pasted from one forum to the next by one troll after the other so many times they’ve got patches at the knee and elbow.
A crude analogy. When I was an eleven- or twelve-year-old boy in the 50s, I remember enjoying something like the following. I’m sitting on the bench during a baseball game when the kid next to me whispers in my ear “Joey’s ma blows dead sailors for nickels pass it on.” Which I did. “Joey,” you see, was farther along the bench. Git it! A laugh riot, no? (Come to think of it, “Joey” occasionally was yours truly.)
So much of what passes for left comment is of this pass along variety. Groundless, mindless criticisms of Bush or Palin, especially, cut and pasted repetition of the exact same sentences from one site to the next, they all have this in common: they’re all variations on “Joey’s ma blows dead sailors.” Jomablodsa, pass it on.
The phenomenon reminds me too of Saturday mornings at “the show,” the movies, when between Tom MIx and Gene Autrey we were treated to something called a “Musical Short Subject,” favorite being a cartoon with music and a Bouncing Ball. Daffy and Tweety would cavort in the background, while supered upfront were the lyrics to, say, “Tea for Two” and a little bouncing ball would hop from syllable to syllable in aid of getting all of the eleven-year-olds to sing exactly in unison: “Tea for two/And two for tea/Me for you/And you for me/. . . .” (Of course being crude eleven-year-olds, and having seen the same short subject a dozen times, we’d improvise: “Me f**k you/And you f**ck me/repeat ad lib.”) I wonder, do they still do that in theatres? In any case, it exemplifies the same mindless orchestration of opinion.
But the response to the Palin piece in a paper was liberal as the Washington Post was anything but uniform. And that was as startling as it was encouraging for Palin’s long-term prospects.
July 15th, 2009 at 10:45 am
JE, don’t apologize for writing about Palin . Just because some of us give her tough love doesn’t mean we love her any less. Even in disarray, she arguably represents the best hope for a functioning two party system.
July 15th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Joe NS has a really good point, and one that is too seldom invoked: we may be in error when we refer to oil and gas as “fossil fuels.”
“Abiogenesis” theory may well be invalid, but it is one of a package of legitimate objections to proclaiming that we know for sure (a) THAT “peak oil” is a certainty, and
that we really have any idea WHEN we will be passing through it.
The calendar date of “Peak oil” has been proclaimed on a number of occasions since at least the 1950s (theories about it were a major driving force behind the creation of OPEC), and on every single occasion has been invalidated by new exploration and recovery technology.
Our projections of peak oil today are more likely to be invalidated in the next 10 years than to prove out.
This doesn’t mean I disagree with Sully on the market forces that could at some point make “alternative” energy sources cost-efficient. We may disagree on how soon that is likely to happen, but Sully has described the process accurately.
From what I can tell, all three of wind, solar, and biofuel technology require improvement before people would choose to go to them as a quality of life enhancement. Harnessing wind takes up so damn much acreage today, compared to the output of the process. So do biofuel crops.
I don’t think people are going to deliberately choose to cover vast landscapes with windmill farms, on the scope demanded by the existing technology, as long as they have alternatives. If the technology improves efficiency, getting the size and intrusiveness of wind power generation arrays way down from their existing footprint, more people will find the concept attractive.
And yes, to Joe NS, the cut-and-pasted Talking Points of the Day retailed by trolls are hilariously pegged by “Jomablodsa.” It’s about that level of “information” that’s being conveyed, which only perfects the analogy.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
And for Barbara — thanks for bringing up the excellent point about litigation under C&T. You’re right, Waxman-Markey would create tremendous new opportunities for litigating private property out of existence.
I too am sorry to see Gingrich pushing the alternative-energy-n-conservation line. Neither one is a bad thing in itself, but it becomes bad when imposed by force. People naturally conserve anything that costs money: government only kills jobs and makes life harder for the poor and middle class when it tries to impose a specified level of conservation artificially.
Gingrich isn’t so much a “small government” guy as a “strong government” guy, in the Fred Barnes formulation.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Only Sarah Palin’s ghost writer could manage to miss the entire point of cap and trade, and write an entire column on legislation aimed at climate change and C02 production without mentioning either climate change or CO2 production.
I guess she’s changed her mind about cap-and-trade since the campaign, when she supported it.
The good news: Two-thirds of Americans laugh when she opens her mouth.
It is a measure of how far conservatism has fallen that Peggy Noonan, who put words in Reagan’s mouth, is now viewed as an apostate, simply for stating the obvious.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
JE, most people wouldn’t recognized the chemical equation that describes the molar burning of octane under pressure. Let me describe it briefly.
On the left: octane plus oxygen
On the right: carbon dioxide, oxygen, and, oh yes, the number 10.6 megajoules!!
Nothing on earth, unless it’s nuclear power, produces such an exothermic reaction. The enrgy consumed by the tiny electric spark that releases this controlled inferno is miniscule. Solar? Don’t make me laugh. Wind? Don’t make me laugh harder.
Counting the energy required to produce high-octane gasoline, the surplus is still enormous By comparison, wind, solar, and ethanol presently show an energy deficit. More energy must be consumed producing solar panels, wind farms, and ethanol than can be extracted. Without massive governmental development subsidies and price supports no one in their right mind would choose them to supply their energy needs.
Gasoline is a marvel, and the ecomongers who attack it are at war more with the laws of chemistry and physics than with mythical ogres like “Big Oil.”
July 15th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Correction: On the right side: carbon dioxide, WATER, and 10.6 megajoules.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Hm… thinking about withdrawing my earlier praise of Quill. A better name might be “Xerox,” since he/she/it seems determined to proffer tired talking points and pass-it-on jibes rather than engaging arguments on their own terms.
She supported McCain’s Cap-and-Trade as dutiful VP nominee. I don’t recall any notable enthusiasm, or even any explication from her. You don’t have to be a supporter of McCain-Lieberman’s C&T to recognize that it’s hardly the same animal as the Waxman-Markey monstrosity. If that’s too much nuance for you, then it’s hard to imagine any purpose in discussing these matters with you at all.
“Enter Insulting” seems to be the motto of the sinistrosphere.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:54 pm