I did take a few minutes to reply to Micah's comment on last week's rant. This will have to serve for now.
once we get some realistic system to control CO_2 production, the cost of the oil will not be the limiting factor. smoke 'em if you got 'em, cuz it's gunna be a different world. just my opinion.
Never thought of that. That's not surprising—after the last 10 years, regulation was the farthest thing from my mind.
on a different note, i've often heard oil companies blame the lack of refining capacity for high gas prices. this seems like utter bullshit (why wouldn't some entrepreneur just build a new refinery and sell for less??).
Definitely. Many refineries are running near capacity. So why aren’t more being built? According to a comprehensive report on the state of the US refining industry conducted by Senator Ron Wyden, 24 refineries have been closed down between 1995 and 2001. Why? From the BBC article:
US environmental laws have made it near impossible to build refineries close to residential populations. But the primary motive behind the lack of US refinery new builds is a basic one, a lack of profits for oil companies.
Wyden uncovered several memos and internal documents from major oil companies. These charted the way that capacity in the US refining industry was reduced to maintain higher profits.
Wyden received one such memo from oil company Texaco, written in 1996. The company felt it was quite clear that petrol supplies needed "reducing."
"The most critical factor facing the refining industry on the West Coast is the surplus refining capacity, and the surplus gasoline production capacity," said the memo.
"The same situation exists for the entire US refining industry. Supply significantly exceeds demand year-round. This results in very poor refinery margins, and very poor refinery financial results. Significant events need to occur to assist in reducing supplies and/or increasing the demand for gasoline."
Interesting stuff. Maybe I need to go back and amend my rant about how rising gas prices aren’t the fault of oil companies….
i like you idea of an apollo-style effort in AE. BUT i think there has been a pretty sustained effort for about 30 years w/o much real success (e.g. we have a national lab in your home state dedicated to renewables: http://www.nrel.gov/). nobel laureate walter kohn (UC santa cruz) has spent much of his career working on AE. he says that solar and fusion are the only reasonable alternatives. fusion still has echnological problems, and solar still costs more than dead dinosaurs.
I’ve heard this before, but this is the first time I’ve heard it from someone with a credible background in science with left-leaning views. This usually comes from folks who say “nothing packs the punch that oil does, therefore we should stop waiting time and money on renewables.” My answer is twofold: well then what do you plan to do when gas becomes too expensive for you to buy it and not enough R&D has been done to make that determination yet. It’s pretty scary to think that might not be the case. Do you think incentives, subsides, and pouring more government money into research will yield any advancements or do you think Kohn and company’s work is about as definitive as it will get? If many renewables aren’t economically feasible with $4/gallon gas, are they more competitive when gas gets to $8 a gallon?
personally, i think there is no "alternative". the answer is to (drastically) reduce the amount of energy we use. i propose doing this by designing our society to be efficient: live in moderate climates, don't travel much, don't transport things long distances, don't support such a large population of humans. if we cut our pop. to 500 million our environmental problems would quickly disappear....
Well that should be easy, Prange. ;-) But I agree that conservation must play a huge part. Even if we can’t transition to these societal changes right away, we can start doing somethings now.
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