Environment

Along with a couple of other energy/environmental items.

That increased oil production will bring down gas prices is one of the most reliable Republican canards when it comes to energy, so what gives?

 

As (the Washington Post’s Brad) Plumer points out, “The big thing to remember is that oil prices are a function of both supply and demand. If world demand for oil rises faster than producers can pump the stuff out, prices will go up”…

 

We have to keep increasing drilling just to keep production steady, and the faster you drill in a particular area the faster production peaks and drops off. That future is an economy pouring ever greater amounts of energy and money into efforts “to extract the last drop of profit through faster depletion of a resource that’s guaranteed to run out.” So the structural economics of continuing to pursue oil are shaky, even if further industry profit is possible.

 

(Think Progress)

I know, seeing conservatives proved wrong is what you’d call a really startling, unexpected occurrence. But once you’ve pulled yourself together, in the wake of that:

As Michael Liebrich, the head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, suggested. “The fact that wind power is now cheaper than coal and gas in a country (Australia) with some of the world’s best fossil fuel resources shows that clean energy is a game changer which promises to turn the economics of power systems on its head,” he said.

 

Consider the situation in Australia. The utilities and the energy market operator have told us that no new baseload is needed until 2020. Now we know that when new capacity is required, technologies such as large scale solar PV, solar thermal with storage (dubbed as better than baseload) will likely be cheaper, along with wind.

 

Coal-fired power stations will not get built, for reputational and economic reasons, and gas – the much touted transition fuel – may also not get a look in. “Costs are just falling so quickly and the cost of fossil fuel are so much higher than public perception,” said Kobad Bhavnagri, head of clean energy research for BNEF in Australia. ”We could leapfrog gas as transition fuel.”

 

Bhavnagri said that by 2020 the “world could look quite different”. The market operator and system will be more experienced and adept at handling intermittency. “The case for gas is not as strong as people assumed a few years ago.”

 

The upshot of that analysis is that the plants we will be building in the 2020s will be – because they are the cheapest options – large scale solar with storage and other dispatchable renewables. The economic case for existing fossil fuel generators will be further undermined.

 

(Renew Economy)

No, I most certainly do not Love The Bomb. But I’ve read about the Manhattan Project, and what that sort of focused intellectual collaboration can accomplish.

Which is why we as a nation need to throw everything we have at making renewable energies our primary way of powering America into the 21st century.

 

Think of it as a new Manhattan Project. We need green energy, local energy, and a 21st century smart grid to handle it all.

 

Over time, the marketplace will do this for us. But with just about every developed country in the world ahead of us, and our dependence on oil making us more and more tightly bound to Middle Eastern dictators and radicals, to wait and hope big transnational corporations will help birth a new America is both naïve and stupid. Instead of depending on them, we should be recovering from them the cost of those externalities – a carbon tax – that can be used to build a new energy infrastructure in America.

 

Let’s take a lesson from Australia and the Eurozone, which have both set up carbon taxes to make 19th century energy barons pay for at least some of the damage they’ve done. And then use that revenue for a green energy revolution here in America.

 

(Truthout)

{ 1 comment }