A CURE FOR OUR OIL ADDICTION?

Lost in the swirl of noise about man-made global warming is the simple fact that that our dependence on oil to fuel our economic engine is not only an environmental problem but a national security problem as well. Let’s face it – all a Hugo Chavez or a Mahmood Ahmedinejad has to do to bring our economy to a screeching halt is to simply turn off the spigot. It would bring this country to its knees within days. Oil would sell for $300 a barrel on the open market. Gasoline would be prohibitively expensive – affordable only to the rich. The cost of shipping would drive the prices of everything to astronomical levels and cause immeasurable hardship, especially to the poor. To say the very least, it would be catastrophic.


Our options are limited, but they are not nonexistent. Our best long range option is to replace gasoline and diesel burning vehicles with electric vehicles. There are a number of electric and hybrid-electric vehicles on the market or soon to be on the market, but most of them are prohibitively expensive for most people. Until the market is saturated with electric vehicles for many years and used vehicles become available at affordable prices, these vehicles will be owned mainly by the well-to-do. Eventually, in a decade or two, most vehicles will be electric or hybrid electric and gasoline and diesel will become marginal vehicular propellants. Now, this prospective scenario raises two vexing questions:


1. What can we do in the short term to reduce our use of oil and oil
distillates?
2. Where is the electricity going to come from to power the cars of the future?


The short-term solution is both simple and difficult. The simple aspect of the solution to our oil dilemma is to mandate a 55 MPH speed limit in this country, and enforce it! This would result in a 20-35% decrease in gasoline burned during highway driving. To maximize fuel efficiency on city streets traffic signals could be synchronized to minimize idling at the light. San Francisco is an example of a large city where traffic signals are synchronized to enhance traffic flow. Muskegon, Michigan is an example of a smaller city where one can expect to pass through several successive green lights without breaking speed. Other jurisdictions have a retro view, where successive traffic signals are synchronized to turn yellow and then red as drivers approach them. Apparently local law enforcement deigns to take advantage of drivers’ frustrations by issuing tickets to drivers for speeding to make the lights or by passing through lights a second or two after they turn red. While these policies produce a revenue stream, they also contribute to this country’s excessive use of oil. So why don’t policy-makers come around to implementing these simple fixes to our oil problem. Well, that’s the difficult aspect of the solution.


Big Oil has a vested interest in the continued gluttonous use of oil and oil distillates, so they will lobby passionately against lowering the speed limits nationwide. They want to keep selling a lot of oil, and they know that politicians do not want to jeopardize their campaign coffers or lobby-sponsored junkets and golf outings. It’s also a safe bet that politicians will not self-regulate the lobby industry for the same reason – they don’t want to give up a good thing. Politicians, despite their rhetoric, are not looking after their constituent’s interests so much as they are looking after their own self-interests and the interests of their special-interests patrons. Unfortunately, the prospects for a short-term fix for our oil problems appear to be very dim indeed.


As for the long-term fix for our dependency on oil, well, that depends to a great deal on the same politicians whom are influenced by the oil interests. You see, energy derived from oil and oil distillates would have to be replaced by energy derived from some other source – namely, electrical energy derived from coal.
More than half of the electricity produced in this country comes from the burning of coal. Coal is plentiful, cheap, and domestically produced (mined). Burning coal to produce electricity has a nasty by-product, however: the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Consequently, environmentalists will lobby passionately against coal-fired power plants. Their passion against coal exceeds even their passion against oil. Global warming proponents tell us that coal is the bogeyman that is dooming the planet, and, to save ourselves, we must stop burning coal. Right!  Just like that! Whether or not man-made global warming is real, and, if it is, what is causing it is a subject for another blog post. The fact of the matter is: we simply need to burn coal at the current time to fulfill our current energy needs, and, given that we’ll need far more electricity in the future to power our automobiles, we’ll need to burn even more coal. We simply can’t get around it. There are now numerous proposals to build more nuclear power plants, which is an about-face from the post Three Mile Island environmentalist agenda. That will take decades. As for replacing coal-generated electricity with solar and wind generated electricity, well, that’s pie-in-the-sky pipe dreaming. Wind farms featuring giant wind turbines dotting the landscape and vast fields of solar panels as currently envisioned will never amount to more than a small slice of our electricity pie. And that pie is growing!
We are told by environmental groups and many politicians that such novel “green” projects can be paid for with “sacrifices” by us consumers. They propose steep energy taxes to pay for research to develop unspecified new technology so we can convert to renewable energy. Cap’n’Trade comes to mind. Fortunately that legislation appears dead on the vine, but there are proposals for an equally odious “utility tax” aimed at customers of coal-generated electricity.


While renewable energy is a noble goal to strive for, the “sacrifices” to achieve this goal will be disproportionately borne by the poor. It will also negatively impact the larger economy by redirecting consumer spending away from the purchase of goods and services. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has proposed a $4 a gallon floor for gasoline, with the extra money directed at renewable energy research and implementation. While it’s a noble concept, the fact remains that $4 a gallon gas helped derail the economy in 2008, and it will do so again. It’s simply a bad idea.


There’s a cockeyed idea that legislation aimed at funding renewable energy by taxes and fees on conventional energy would include subsidies for the poor. Subsidies seldom fully cover the excess cost of anything. Moreover, such programs would create another layer of bureaucracy as well as vast opportunities for fraud.
There is a way to make a dent in the generation of electricity as currently produced from the burning of coal. The question is - will our elected officials experience a paradigm shift in their approach to tackling the energy problem? Unlikely! But, nevertheless, here’s a proposal.


The landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of steel towers supporting high-tension power transmission lines carrying electricity to the various communities serviced by the power generating plants. Why not install moderately sized wind turbines, say, with fifteen-foot diameter blades, on each tower. Electricity generated by each wind turbine would be fed into a dedicated line supported along with the rest of the lines along the towers to batteries located at the substations from where the electricity would be integrated into the grid. Granted, this wouldn’t be cheap, but it would still be more cost-effective than an equivalent amount of power generated by multi-million dollar multi-ton jumbo wind turbines on 500 foot tall towers on wind farms or out in the coastal waters or in the Great Lakes. Only a few companies, GE, for example, are equipped to manufacture the huge turbines, while the smaller turbines can be made by hundreds of local companies throughout the country, thus increasing competition and reducing costs. Additionally, similar turbines could be installed by private citizens on rooftops.


There are, however, some potential headwinds that would have to be overcome.


1. The cost
2. Local ordinances


Power companies would have to raise their rates dramatically to cover the costs of installing tower-top wind turbines. To ameliorate that, they would have to be given substantial tax breaks. Homeowners, likewise, would be unlikely to cover the substantial upfront costs of installing rooftop wind turbines unless they could write off the cost of purchase and installation. There are already tax breaks available for those who install rooftop solar panels. The same type of break could be extended to homeowners who wish to install rooftop wind turbines. Maybe such tax breaks are already available.


Where would the money come from to cover the revenue lost to tax breaks? Well, there are hundreds of millions of dollars a year being doled out to “researchers” who are studying global warming. Since global warming is already accepted as fact by many scientists (though not necessarily by all of them), there seems little point in continuing to “prove”, over and over again, that global warming is real. To many recipients of government grants, proving that global warming exists represents a cash cow. Some of the research is valid and has its proper place, but a great deal of it is fraudulent. Competent oversight would limit who gets how much with respect to climate change research and other nebulous research as well. Much of that money could be redirected to covering the cost of renewable energy generation. The keyword here is “Competent Oversight”. Where could one find the bureaucrats who could oversee the various grant programs. There are dozens of government agencies doling out cash to various scientists doing research on their own terms. There is little oversight. That needs to change. Billions of dollars are wasted on pet projects and quack research that could be better spent on real research and subsidies that will actually accomplish something for the greater good, particularly with respect to our energy needs.


Another problem is the local jurisdictions that have ordinances on the books limiting rooftop contrivances of any kind, including solar panels and wind turbines. Never mind that neighborhood skylines were cluttered with TV antennae of all shapes and sizes just a generation ago. Getting ossified city and township bureaucrats to granting variances or changing the rules to allow individual rooftop power-generating devices stacks up to be a tall order.
All told, there are formidable political, bureaucratic, and financial obstacles in the way of converting to a substantial program of renewable energy. It will require thinking outside the box by politicians on the local, state, and national levels , and the inventiveness of entrepreneurs to come up with solutions to our energy needs. From where I sit, it doesn’t look promising.