People talk about renewable energy sources like they were the best thing that could happen to modern society, but just look at reality. 99.999% of all energy consumed in our modern world is produced by petroleum. Setting aside atomics, name one source of electricity that is more efficiently produced in the necessary quantities by anything other than petroleum based fuels, and I’m saying natural gas is a petroleum based product. ALL of the worlds aircraft, civilian or military uses kerosene. ALL surface ships burn oil based products. Except for a very tiny portion of ground transportation, all of us use gasoline, kerosene (diesel), or LPG to power our vehicles.
The biggest consumer of petroleum is the military. Are we going to sacrifice our national defense by eliminating petroleum as a fuel? I think not.
Solar and wind are not sustainable since the machines and panels needed to produce electricity need to be replaced at intervals and are too expensive. Hydrogen likewise must be cracked from natural gas to be produced in sufficient quantities to be a viable source.
I just can’t see The Green New Deal working on any level. Ever.
7 replies on “Petroleum runs this world!”
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Sometimes when you are of a certain mindset, you become very much unaware of your blindspots. I don’t wish to come across as pontificating here, but if I may suggest that a very big blindspot here for American conservatives is renewables.
I’m not trying to blow my own trumpet, but I know a fair amount about electric vehicles and renewable energy. I’ve been following it for a number of years, reading probably 30-40 articles a day at one point on the latest news, participating in forums, and consuming hours and hours of content.
If anything, the meteoric rise of Tesla (I’ve been following them detailedly since they were $150 a share [pre-split], now $4,225 – sadly not in a position to invest or I’d have been retired by now) should tell you that renewable energy is the new future.
I simply don’t have the space in a response to go into detail, but suffice to say that the USA offshore wind potential alone would power the entire country twice over. The UK has large offshore wind farms, with turbines the size of the Eiffel Tower going in the Irish Sea; as well as solar, biomass and some pumped hydro for grid balancing; bringing renewables on average to around 1/3 of the total grid production needs. https://gridwatch.co.uk/
The National Grid recently put in large Tesla Megapacks for load balancing and storage. Highview Power are building the world’s largest liquid air cryo-battery in Manchester https://www.gov.uk/government/news/greater-manchester-to-house-to-worlds-largest-liquid-air-battery We’ve even got an Australian company investing in a trial plant here that turns any mixed plastics back into crude oil. https://www.letsrecycle.com/news/latest-news/plastics-to-oil-machine-uk/ And I haven’t even got time to discuss the potential for perovskite to replace silicon in solar panels.
Coal is already pretty much dead. Natural Gas is now more expensive to build a new plant than solar or wind. Oil isn’t far behind, with a small amount likely remaining for plastics we can’t yet recycle over the next 5 decades. Nuclear, whilst cheap to run isn’t cheap to build or clean up; and those costs have to be taken into account. The 2019 Government Nuclear Provison forecast is that future clean-up across the UK will cost around £124 billion spread across the next 120 years or so, a slight increase on the previous year’s estimate.
And before anyone complains about the subsidisation for renewable energy; a recent European Report shows that the UK government subsidises the fossil fuels industry by £10.5bn a year, compared to the £7.3bn it spends on renewables; and it’s not like the oil companies aren’t profiting already. The total fossil fuel subsidies in the EU were €55bn in 2016, the report concluded. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=COM:2019:1:FIN&from=EN
It used to be that conservatism was the party of future technology. It’s about time we stopped snubbing what is coming as the future. I don’t really see any issue with this sort of energy production. The only issue is that other countries have gotten the jump on the means of production. Luckily for you guys the USA has got Elon Musk who owns Tesla and Solar City, at least putting American production on the curve. Get with it. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not.
I’m aware of Elon Musk and what he has done with electric cars, but the fact still remains they suck energy from the grid that we don’t have or will in the near future. I doubt very seriously I’ll still be alive to see the day it will.
Also, let the “greens” know this: Old solar farms are not recyclable, reusable or repurposeable. Ditto with wind farm turbine blades.
“Renewable” energy is a farce. It does not accomplish what the left claims it will accomplish. Metals like copper that are needed to build these windmills, batteries, solar panels. etc. would need to be mined at much larger rates and much more aggressively, forests would have to be cleared and open space would have to be taken up by these windmill and panel farms which destroys habitats, disturbs wildlife and creates an eyesore; plus renewable energy would only meet a fraction of the energy demands our economy requires and we would need to pick up the slack with fossil fuels. It makes absolutely no sense. This green push has nothing to do with the environment, and all with transforming our economy from a free-market to a socialist economy. Restricting our travel, choices, freedom all in the name of saving the environment.
The environment will take care of itself. If this scourge called humanity were to vanish tomorrow, do you think the planet would even notice? Seriously, there is nothing we can do to change what we have done in a meaningful way and I doubt we have harmed the planet in any way it can’t recover from by itself. If it’s true and the seas do rise, there is nothing to do but move to a higher ground. It’s like a dog with fleas, it’s just a nuisance.
I’ve been saying this for years. Human hubris is monumental.