By Michael J. Economides, Professor, Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston
Few issues in modern history have generated more ideology-driven misinformation than energy. While most would agree that energy is crucial to the world economy, very little public discourse seems based on the intractability of certain facts. The problem: the huge gap between the theoretical and the practical, the latter affected by logistical and economic considerations. For certain people, the achievement of their desired course of action, based on their preferred world-view, is often confronted with abysmally small odds. It should not be acceptable for governments and non-governmental groups to avoid disclosing the required path and costs for achieving their goals. Many imply that the government and/or taxes should provide the funds, but even then the magnitude of such costs is rarely revealed.
Much of the rhetoric involves issues such as conservation, the environment, and “energy independence.” Exacerbating the situation is the recent clamor about anthropogenic global warming, and the expressed desire to either reduce carbon dioxide emissions (by using non-fossil fuels) or to sequester them.
The sequestration (into drilled wells) of carbon dioxide is even more problematic. If the sequestered carbon dioxide is injected at what is considered a very good rate per well, 10,000 tons per year (a figure from a 2004 report by the National Energy Technology Laboratory), then that would require 1.8 million new wells. That’s about the same number of wells now in production worldwide. At an average drilling cost of $2 million per well, those new wells will cost $3.6 trillion. The ancillary infrastructure for those wells could push the cost to $7.2 trillion – about 60 times the current annual budget for well construction in the industry, estimated at $120 billion. See full story here
By Alexander Cockburn, The Nation
No response is more predictable than the reflexive squawk of the greenhouse fearmongers that anyone questioning their claims is in the pay of the energy companies. Actually, the energy companies have long since adapted to prevailing fantasies, dutifully reciting the whole catechism about carbon neutrality, repositioning themselves as eager pioneers in the search for alternative fuels, settling comfortably into new homes, such as British Petroleum’s Energy Biosciences Institute at UC, Berkeley (or Exxon Mobil’s huge investment into Stanford University).
Man-made-global-warming theory is fed by pseudo-quantitative predictions from climate careerists working primarily off the megacomputer General Circulation Models, whose home ports include the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Department of Commerce’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab.
These are multibillion-dollar computer modeling bureaucracies as intent on self-preservation and budgetary enhancement as cognate nuclear bureaucracies at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. They are as unlikely to develop models refuting the hypothesis of human-induced global warming as is the IPCC to say the weather is getting a little bit warmer but there’s no great cause for alarm. Threat inflation is their business.
The world’s best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man’s physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear and coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge National Lab. White House advisory bodies on climate change in the Clinton/Gore years were well freighted with nukers like Larry Papay of Bechtel. As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years, Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump budgets and rouse voters. By the mid-’90s he’d positioned himself at the head of a strategic alliance formed around “the challenge of climate change,” which stepped forward to take Communism’s place in the threatosphere essential to political life. See full story here
By William M. Reilly, UPI UN Correspondent
A former chief of the U.N. World Health Organization who also is a former prime minister of Norway and a medical doctor has declared an end to the climate-change debate. Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, one of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s three new special envoys on climate change, also headed up the 1987 U.N. World Commission on Environment and Development where the concept of sustainable development was first floated.
“This discussion is behind us. It’s over,” she told reporters. “The diagnosis is clear, the science is unequivocal—it’s completely immoral, even, to question now, on the basis of what we know, the reports that are out, to question the issue and to question whether we need to move forward at a much stronger pace as humankind to address the issues.”
According to Icecap’s Norwegian sources, Gro Harlem Brundtland “...is a socialist and former chair of the Norwegian Labor Party. Her UN report “Our Common Future” pointed out 3 major challenges for our World: (1) The ozone hole created by anthropogenic CFCs, (2) An increasing Greenhouse Effect from anthropogenic CO2 and (3) The increasing population vs. the Earth’s sustainability.
From her UN position she may be regarded as the one who elevated the “CO2 Problem” from a narrow academic discussion to an alarming international level covering ordinary people to international leaders. If you read her references in her UN report, you will see that she builds her report mainly on political speeches and popular science, and to a very small degree on scientific publications built on first principles.”
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