Frack Fuels for the Foreseeable Future?

Fossil Fuels and Troubled Waters!

Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

ISSUES: We need fossil fuel for the foreseeable future. Natural gas is a bridge fuel. We can adapt to global warming. Natural gas burns cleaner than other fuels. No other energy source is apparent at the present time. All of these statements come from the fossil fuel industry, pumped out over and over through the sympathetic media. Consider the source.

Q1. We need fossil fuels for the foreseeable future? In part it depends on whether you look further than the next few years. Taking a long view, it isn’t hard to see what is going to happen to the surface of the earth if we continue with them. The carbon dioxide being dumped into the air is affecting our weather now. If you look at the places where extraction is going on you find the earth’s surface is being altered at an alarming rate in ways that negate its use for biological purposes.

Canada’s tar sands not only destroy the tar sands area, but also the areas where gas is removed to heat the sands to get the oil out of it, and the pipeline planned to carry it from the center of the continent to the sea, where it can be shipped across the sea to release the carbon dioxide. Think about it: four different sources of pollution from the one resource.

There was an announcement of sixteen different Marcellus wells permitted in Doddridge County WV on just one day recently. If you “fly” over the surface between US Route 19 in Harrison County and WV Route 28 in Doddridge using the Google Earth application, you will see a “pox” developing on the landscape. These are well locations with their pits and long straight lines of bare ground for the pipelines.

In a few months this “pox” so easily seen now will be intensified when the US Department of Agriculture flies this year’s aerial photography survey. This forms the ground picture for Google Earth and drilling for the year between summer 2012 and summer 2013 will appear. This “pox” on the surface will go on intensifying for a decade or more, if no change occurs. All the while carbon dioxide is pouring out into the atmosphere.

Then the structures will be abandoned, if the past is any guide to the future. Pollution on the ground will go on for a century, like the coal industry pollution, to be cleaned up later at public expense, if at all. Clean water, desirable living space, hunting and fishing, outdoor recreation, all be damned.

Q2. Natural gas is a bridge fuel?  No other source is ever mentioned. Occasionally some vague reference to “renewables,” but frequently in the next paragraph a claim that they aren’t competitive and never will be. No mention of truly advanced technology such as fusion power waiting to get out of the box. Nuclear fusion could be low-polluting. All investments go into fossil fuel, tried and true with almost no investment to really forward looking research.

Q3. We can adapt to global warming? Tell that to New Orleans, to New Jersey, to the Eskimo. Coastal areas will be most affected. And recall that in the Arctic region methane bubbles out of the long frozen ground each summer, methane which is 20 to 100 times as damaging in warming the earth as carbon dioxide. Watch the decline of Arctic ice here.

Interested in drought? Check here or here. In any case get your facts from where measurements are made, not from fossil fuel minions.

O4. No other energy source is apparent at the present time? Bosh! Several countries are much further along than the United States. Portugal now gets 40 percent of its electricity from renewable power. Germany got 20.7 percent of its electricity from renewable energy in 2011. The reasons are here.

Even Fox Network acknowledges Germany’s renewable success, although Rupert Murdoch disparages renewables while investing in natural gas in the eastern Mediterranean. For a laugh, look here.

One reason fossil fuels are so profitable and dominant in the market is subsidized. According to The International Monetary Fund, subsidies are a principal cause of global warming.

They say the annual $1.9 trillion (nine zeros), world wide subsidy, is a principal cause of advantage to fossil fuels, a boost to greenhouse emissions (both carbon dioxide and methane as well as some minor green house gases), and helps limit investment in renewable energy. It also encourages over consumption. IMF figures world removal of subsidies would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 4.5 billion long tons annually, and sulfur dioxide by 13 million long tons.

The U. S. grants $502 billion in subsidies to fossil fuel, China $279 billion and Russia 116 billion. For the sake of comparison, the United States Gross Domestic product was $15.8 trillion in 2012, so the U. S. energy subsidy to fossil fuels is a little over 3% of the GDP.

Q5. Will there be life after oil and gas and coal? It is too early to tell. The only for sure part is that, if there is, it will be very different from what we have seen so far on this earth. Technology will have to change from what we have now, and perhaps our social organization, too.

Tagged as: bridge fuel, climate change, drilling, fracking, greenhouse gases, marcellus shale, methane, natural gas, renewable energy