We Are Running Out of Energy--The Big Lie Gets Bigger
Guess What? We Never Will Run Out of Energy! Even Before the Arab Oil Embargo and Oil Crisis of the 1970s the Lies About Running Out of Energy Have Been Propagated. How and Why?
Lex Loeb Contributor Network
.
The world came to an end. We ran out of energy. We all know the story because we have seen the movie over and over again. Remember the desperation and violence to get energy in the Mad Max Movie? Didn't it star Mel Gibson and Tina Turner? That was enough to make it completely real! The world may have already come to an end because we have run out of energy already. The industrial revolution was founded on whale oil as the clean burning oil for multiple industrial uses and for indoor lighting because whale oil was and is one of the cleanest burring oils there is. John D, Rockefeller with his development of downstream uses of petroleum did more to save the whales than all of the save the whales legislation did. We ran out of oil already and almost nobody noticed! There are many reasons not to like petroleum and petroleum based fuels along with sister so called fossil natural gases and hydrocarbons but there are still more reasons to love them. Petroleum and gasoline have become so useful in our everyday life as to become a virtual necessity. It is not a necessity without alternatives but it has competitive advantages in price and power that it packs per volume. The only reason petroleum and gasoline have any value at all is precisely because of what economists call scarcity. Without scarcity it would be completely free and if it were free of charge than it would not have any value at all. Sunshine is free and it might be able to power solar panels but try to put a price on it by the square foot of exposure. Gasoline and diesel do more to power the economy precisely because of their relative scarcity because people are then motivated to work to find the petroleum, process it, transport it and distribute it. Water maybe just as much of a necessity as gasoline if not even more of a necessity but the cost per gallon is usually less than that of gasoline or diesel unless it has been brewed into something like a cup of Starbuck's coffee.
The big lies about how we are running out of energy has ulterior motives that have nothing to do with real life scarcity because in point of fact gasoline , diesel , natural gas, coal are not so rare that we will run out of them they are just scarce enough to allow the build out of a major economy necessary to find, produce, refine , transport and distribute these products to a hungry and willing to buy market that already exists. This is because of millions of machines built to run on these types of fuels exclusively. The price of diesel and gasoline is a precarious price which means supply can easily surpass demand even in our present state of economy which is why OPEC even exists still to begin with. OPEC would no longer need to exist if there was not the possibility feared by major producing members of OPEC that supply can still exceed demand. When supply does exceed demand ships filled with diesel can not give the stuff away. Before the founding of OPEC That was exactly what happened at times. Oil exporters over produced and were punished by not being able to unload ships full of the stuff. Since OPECs founding that has very rarely happened. If we were really running out of Oil, OPEC would simply not exist. If Diamonds were really so rare that we were running out of them the diamond cartel would also cease to exist. Market prices would prevail at levels no politics would be required to set prices in either case. When you see a cartel in price it simply means supply can still exceed demand and that can cause prices of commodities to sell more the way fresh water is sold running out of taps. If we had a Mad Max Market place you would see oil quoted in the hundreds of dollars per gallon possibly. Actually Mad Max market conditions would not last very long. This is because high gasoline prices inevitably lead to the alternatives suddenly having competitive advantages. The economy will work to reorganize it self with energy alternatives because of lack of supply re setting the price to unfordable levels. The minute a commodity becomes a luxury it the minute the alternatives start making sense and the economy will start to reorganize it self accordingly. Unfortunately the environmental fundamentalists who dispose the so called fossil fuels that include gasoline and coal want to destroy the economies that facilitate and supply these resources to the market and to do this they believe with all kinds of academic verses that if they can just artificially cause supply to dry up the demand will go away and the markets will switch to alternatives. It won't work because the world has machines in service that all run on the fossil fuels and a lot of the reason why these machines including power plants require gas and coal and diesel is precisely because the same environmental fundamentalists forced them to do so by limiting the development of nuclear power. The environmental fundamentalists did the same thing with plastic super market bags. They are the ones who were against the paper bags because they were made of dead trees and plastic bags were not. Now suddenly after they were instrumental in getting almost all super markets to use plastic bag want to get rid of the plastic bags that are now popular in the market place! Artificial limits to supply or demand are going to backfire every time. Not content to allow free markets to go on using fossil fuels the environmental fundamentalists have invented new excuses for why they should not be used these have included :Peak Oil which turned out to be a complete BS crock of a theory. That did not work so they embraced the theory of carbon dioxide global warming. The atmosphere failed to warm so they changed the lie to "climate change" because they want cap and trade no matter how stupid the raison d'etre is. The cap and trade nonsense won't do a thing to prevent use of carbon that ends up in the atmosphere because the environmental fundamentalists have already done a great job making that kind of industry illegal in places like the US so it happily moves to China and India where the politics are that there should be no limits on pollution if it makes their economy rich.
The Lies go on and on and on with the big lie about running out of energy already proving to be total nonsense. You have to understand that scarcity is the only reason an economic system as big as the one we have for fossil fuels exists in the first place but you cannot make things artificially scarce to somehow change the dynamics of the market place or to install the alternatives. The same people who prevented nuclear energy breeder reactors being built in the US are the same ones who are telling all the new lies about gas , oil and coal. Nuclear energy can be used to run virtually anything gasoline can run and efficiently. It has it's environmental drawbacks including gamma radiation. When you see all the fanfare over cars that convert gasoline to electricity like the prius you are just looking at an old technology that was applied to locomotives for freight railways before the co generation system was developed for cars. There are differences in how direct the power is from the engine to the generator and whether a battery is in place or not between the two. It is proving to be very economically feasible but it still requires fossil fuels. The ability to get more miles per gallon for less gasoline makes perfect sense then because it does not rely on the lie of conservation nor on the lie of need for artificial supply. Nuclear batteries can do exactly the same thing in a co-generation type car by creating electricity that gets stored in a battery or goes directly to the electric engines of cars, lawn mowers, airplanes. The problem is that the public fears the nuclear radiation. The radiation can be contained by adding to the weight of the machines with lead other shielding. Companies like Cerydine actually can use the technology used in ceramic body armor to slow down or stop radiation from punching though with less weight. A jet air plane running nuclear battery power would add weight in shielding but save weight in not having to pack gasoline in the wings. Jet planes already expose passengers to significant radiation flying above 30,000 ft of atmosphere so there might be some trade offs that actually favor the nuclear batteries including lighter aircrafts without the dead weight of unburnt fuel supplies on board. The same would be true of nuclear battery cars, buses trucks etc. You never hear your government officials even considering talking about nuclear batteries--passive nuclear batteries that just work on the basis of nuclear decay not in having actual nuclear reactions of fission or fusion happening on board. The reason why is that the existing economies of scale for petroleum and gasoline don't want real competition and work to protect their market and because the environmental fundamentalists fear nuclear anything more than gasoline because there have been more Planet of the Apes type movies than Mad Max stories. Betting on a real nuclear future is a better idea than wasting one's time thinking about solar or wind because it can put the power where it is needed in a concentrated space with a real machine that is necessary. The first passive nuclear batteries were installed on space craft and in implanted heart pacemakers. Larger versions and even more efficient smaller versions could do a lot to power things in a much more futuristic way with virtually no environmental consequences except for contamination from accidental spills and crashes. There are trade offs. with the development of new materials from companies like Certainer and Corning it seems inevitable that a lot of machines maybe including lap tops will soon be smaller and more light weight with nuclear batteries running them.
The main lies about running out of energy have been one of these on the list:
The conservation lie: Why should we bother to conserve something that will really go up in price so it is no longer a commodity and instead a luxury because of instant automatic market scarcity?
The Lie about Nature not providing enough fossil fuels on earth: Whole moons of Jupiter and Saturn are mostly frozen methane gas. It is entirely possible that a bigger part of the earth is made of hydro carbons than any one can be sure of now.
The Peak Oil Lie. Occidental petroleum among other companies has found a brand new technology that allows what were once considered dry wells to produce more oil than they were originally thought to have or had been pumped out already.
The Environment cannot suffer an accident lies: The World War II coated a lot of the world's coast lines with oil and yes they are pristine again. The gulf oil spill and the Valdez oil spill caused damage but it did not permanent harm to any ecosystem. ecosystems are adaptive.
Solar and Wind Power are viable alternatives lies: Not at the present level of economic feasibility with oil gas and coal as real existing alternatives. Solar systems might not last as long as they are advertised to do so for pay pack and they have a certain amount of energy and capital invested packed into them that needs to be considered in the equation before judging the system only on cost. some solar systems maybe come economically feasible particularly in desert areas like say Phoenix Arizona and not in places like say Chicago. Wind Power machines may not pay back and wind farms are an ugly blight on the physical environment. Space based solar wind and solar power machines might be a real alternative but them we have to either send the power down by microwave beam or send it down on wires attached to space elevators. Sending projectiles down to earth the way meteor's become hot on impact will ultimately prove a more reliable means of bringing energy back to earth from space once developed. One might be concerned that rockets piecing the atmosphere might have more to do with changes in the atmosphere like the hole in the ozone than the original hole in the ozone liars ever wanted to admit.
The Global Warming lie: The scientific evidence still does not support this nor "climate change" because the theory does not seem to mesh with atmospheric reality. Carbon in the atmosphere is a trace amount compared to say Nitrogen or Oxygen in the atmosphere and carbon dioxide is not a catalyst. Oxygen can be a catalyst as can Hydrogen in combustion reactions. CO2 is very stable and a set molecule without much reactivity. See my piece on associated content called the carbon quiz.
The nuclear power lie: Nuclear power can do a lot for the energy needs of a world civilization at the level of US prosperity. There is dumb nuclear power that has less economic feasibility than fossil fuels do and so it should be on hold until it has feasibility that makes economic sense in comparison. The engineering know how and technology is vastly improved since Chernobyl and three mile island thanks to the amazing computing power we now have. it took super computers to model nuclear testing after it became illegal now we have that level of computing power in some of our home computers. That makes it possible for engineering design of more efficient cost effective safer nuclear power plants. Passive nuclear power works like a self contained solar panel box that absorbs the decay radiation with in and that can power all sorts of automotive type machines from planes, boats,cars, trucks, buses , lawn mowers and farm , mining machines and even an army of warfare robots. The technology exists and unfortunately so does an industry of fear mongering in the media. Nuclear waste might be one of the most valuable scarce resources on the plant to give us the cleanest most powerful source of energy imaginable.
The sustainability lie: Energy is 100 percent sustainable so long as it is economically feasible otherwise it is not.
If you are reading this you are not dead and you probably still have electricity that you can afford to pay for because you are reading it on a computer screen. People believe what they want to believe. People also like to believe certain kinds of lies that are told over and over again. Why lies about energy resources are so popular and inspiring to so many people seems like a bit of a mystery until the dynamics of the reason the lies are generated is understood and why people take the bait when cast out to them by the propaganda in the news media. Part of it is a popular psychology of dependence and part of it is the natural market place for energy that attaches a value for a unit of power which is a bit like putting a price on magic. Perhaps one in fifteen people can accurately explain how when they plug an lamp into an electric socket how the electricity works to illuminate the light bulb. Even more magical is how plugging in a television or a home computer can be powered by something invisible coming out of a couple of slit like holes in the wall. People are even more mystified by how energy works even when they take it for granted. Electricity looks invisible but for some reason it definitely does not come free of charge. Used to heat one's home the cost of energy input becomes even more substantial just as does converting 20 gallons of gasoline into something like 400 miles of driving an automobile. At that average rate it costs 15 cents a mile to be driving around. Angry works like magic . The industrial revolution and our use of machines that produce and use energy including fossil fuels make our economy sustainable not unsustainable. Without petroleum we might actually need to give up horse power and go back to horses. If you think of sustainability the way the greens make it out to be it is going back to times like the Roman empire were human beings living a life as life long slaves kept their civilization sustainable instead of having the types of machines we now have running. Just look at one of those Roman ships with all the human power they required to keep the oars rowing. We don't want anything to do with the kind of sustainability the greens and the BS academics are calling for because it could be you doing the rowing for emperor Al Gore.
When you read about or hear about the "need for a national energy policy" you know you are hearing total bs if they add any of the lies above into the equation. You want to hear about economic feasibility not sustainability if you want to have a real discussion. You want to hear about nuclear research and development as opposed to all the nonsense about the so called green alternatives. You don't want to hear lies about liquid hydrogen unless it is made directly from solar on site because otherwise hydrogen is just a form of a battery and is not an energy fuel it also requires deep cooling that costs a lot of energy beyond the power it stores. When you hear the government wants to waste or spend your money on future energy resources you want to hear about nuclear and space options you don't want to hear about ethanol if it requires subsidies to be economically feasible because then it is a complete waste of money that cannot compete with existing fossil fuels as alternatives and may actually just be a reformative use of fossil fuels in disguise. If you get a lecture on how we are ever going to run out of energy you should know after reading this article that it is a complete lie and fabrication because we will never run out of energy so long as something else becomes economically feasible. The power of gasoline is that few other fuels can actually compete in price or in weight. If you make super saturated sugar water it has lots of calories in it but the same amount of gasoline or diesel has almost 4 times the number of BTUs the last time I did the calculations. Did you know that you can run a car on wood chips or wood pellets with a steam engine? Yes you can with no gasoline . The problem is you gain a hundred or more pounds of fuel over the on board weight of gasoline in order to get the same number of BTUs . It is very possible to build a wood chip burner or a pellet burner in to a car and it can be as economically feasible as gasoline in cost just a little more Smokey for the environment with a hundred or more pounds added in fuel weight to the vehicle that reduces gas miles. you can subside that with compressed air to run pistons. The French have come up with a car that uses compressed air tanks as interchangeable batteries. To get the compressed air in the tank takes a remote power plant using some other form of energy . I think it was Jules Vern who came up with the idea of using compressed air instead of burring gasoline to get the pistons to move. What it shows is there are plenty of real alternative energy means and the car is never going away! The lies that you need to be on public transportation are total BS because there is no evidence that they necessarily save any energy because one has to count the cost of energy put into manufacturing these modes of transportation in the first place and some of that energy is included in the initial cost of the capital investment. Using tax money to buy these things we know usually costs more than leaving capital in more efficient private industries so the costs are even higher and the real economic feasibility is a lot less than often advertised in propaganda campaigns. When your politicians and government officials and green academics scream and yell that you listen to them about a need for a national or state energy policy give them the finger if their message is not more energy at a lower price! That is what the real argument has to be all about . If the cost is not lower and the supply is not greater you are getting the energy shaft and there is no reason these people should be taking real energy alternatives like nuclear off the table either because of ignorance or because of polls showing the public fears anything with the world nuclear in it.
.
Close
Best Kept Secret Park in Lake Oswego Great for Bike Riders, Walking and Running with Scenic River Views Lex Loeb Contributor Network . Lake Oswego does not like to advertise some of its best attractions for fear of attracting non-locals. The area has many interesting treasures almost no one from the Portland area bothers to explore. Lake Oswego has long had the cache' of an upper middle class white Anglo Saxon enclave that does not want the company of everyone from the Portland Metro Area coming in. One can't blame the present day city for trying to protect itself against crowds of non local strangers using their public facilities. Anyone who has been to lake Oswego actual lake knows it is a privately owned body of water that does not welcome the public access in anyway. That is not true of the Oswego Furnace Tower in George Rogers Park or Old River Drive that connects to the park's main pathway up along the Willamette river front. Along most of Old River drive the fro
Comments
Post a Comment