I actually believe this has a factual answer, so I’m lobbing it into GQ.
First, let me say this: I am eco-freindly when practical and I’m not here to defend a position.
A cow-orker loves to run her mouth about how we are all pigs laying waste to mother earth. Her latest tirade was about riding her bike to work - we stopped short of giving her a medal. For kicks, I decided to throw her a curve ball, so I hit her with this (truth in question) and walked away:
The USA market is the biggest user of fossil fuels. Automobiles are regulated, pollution controlled and subject to inspection for emmisions under EPA guidelines. There are other massive/growing markets that, along with the USA, are set on a path to blow through every last drop of crude oil known to man. We agreed that X am’t of fossil fuel will be burned, wherein X is all fossil fuel.
Every bike riding, electric-car cruising, solar-panel waving greenie is just taking fossil fuels that could be burned here with some degree of emissions and pollution control and diverting it to markets where it will be burned almost without regard for the planet.
We (USA) should gobble up all the fossil fuels and make it our moral obligation to keep it out of the hands of other less responsible countries.
I even did some half-arsed algebra equation to show that if other countries burn the fossil fuels that we could burn here, it would actually result in MORE pollution.
So I left her to ponder the thought…and then I started to think about it and started to believe my half-baked story.
Nope. You may have a point when it comes to certain kinds of fossil-fuel pollution which are regulated more strictly in the US than in third-world economies, but for things like greenhouse-gas impact and consequent global warming, your argument has no merit. Fossil fuel use releases excess carbon into the atmosphere everywhere in the world (barring some hypothetical mandatory carbon-sequestration mechanism which doesn’t actually exist at present).
Moreover, the whole argument is kind of half-assed as a proposal for actually decreasing environmental damage. It’s kind of like saying “Let’s eat all the world’s cake and doughnuts to keep them out of the hands of third-world populations, because our health-care system is better equipped than theirs to deal with all the resulting obesity-related health problems!” It would make a lot more sense, from the point of view of public health generally, for us to cut down on our consumption of doughnuts and cake while encouraging healthier diets in other countries too.
Similarly, the smart move environmentally is not for us to frantically accelerate our own fuel consumption and pollution in order to make other countries consume and pollute less, but to assist them in cutting down (e.g., by developing and transfering renewable-energy technologies) while simultaneously cutting down our own waste and pollution.
I’ve heard it mentioned, when talking about electric vs. combustion, that it’s about the ability to contain and centralize emmissions. It’s much easier to contol the emmissions of several hundred (or thousand?) power plants, when compared to the zillions of automobiles, factories, and whatever else there is out there.
Doesn’t it all come down to supply and demand in the long run?
I have always held the position if anyone should burn fuels it should be the US, if anyone is going to drill for oil it should be the US, if anyone is going to use cheap ‘dirty’ fuels it should be the US, the reason is we can do it better and cleaner then anyone else, and by the US gobbling up all the cheap dirty fuels (heavy sour crude), the price of those fuels will rise so the other countries will choose the clean burning stuff.
I think Philster means more along the lines of how efficiently we use fossil fuels. Yeah, if we burn 100% of all of the fuel anywhere in the world this very second, we’re going to have such and such amount of carbon released. If we burned it all ourselves, we’re going to make is last a lot longer, so even though the same net carbon is released, it’s released over a longer amount of time providing an opportunity for it to be absorbed into the environment. Okay, we’re (1) not going to release all of it this very second, and (2) not going to be able to hog all of it ourselves, but by allowing less developed countries to use it less efficiently, they’re using it quicker and releasing the carbon quicker than if they were as efficient as ourselves.
In terms of automobiles, I would hazard a guess that the U.S. ranks pretty low in terms of overall fuel economy. We would probably be better off letting the Europeans have the oil.
The primary concern right now with fossil fuels is CO2 emissions and global warming. Capture and sequestration of CO2 is still in its infancy at this point and not used to any appreciable extent in the U.S., so it doesn’t really matter where it is used. The other major pollutants from oil, i.e. hydrocarbons, NOx, and SO2, tend to lead to more localized problems such as smog or acid rain.
Coal can be pretty dirty though and the mercury released will hang around the atmosphere and spread around the globe. Most major industrial nations have their own sources of coal though, so the U.S. will have a tough time keeping it out of their hands. On the other hand, I know the EPA is working with China to transfer some of our coal pollution control technology there.
I have a hard time believing it makes sense for me to drive an SUV instead of a Honda Accord so that I can increase my utility with a bit of extra comfort, as an alternative to, say, a Chinese schoolbus bringing kids to school everyday. Your argument might hold some water if environmental protection were the only objective we were interested in maximizing. For many people it’s not, though. There are people in the developing world who don’t have heat, refrigeration, etc. and for us to deny them the right to those things because they don’t meet our current standards of environmentalism seems quite selfish. When we were developing, we didn’t adhere to our current standards, either.
If that’s the case, then we’re doomed no matter what. If we find a good replacement for fossil fuels before they run out, then they won’t actually run out. And if we don’t find a good replacement for them before they run out, then society will collapse in the meanwhile, and we probably never will. And developing and using things like electric vehicles is one of the first baby steps to finding a good replacement.
Right. The OP’s argument might make some sense if we were somehow required to use up all the world’s fossil fuel as soon as possible, in the most pollution-minimizing way possible. But it is not a realistic argument for the best strategy to minimize global environmental damage in real life.
Like it or not, Philster’s annoying sanctimonious co-worker is essentially right about the need for US consumers to cut down on waste and pollution in their fuel use. The “bike riding, electric-car cruising, solar-panel waving greenies” are in fact doing the right thing.
She certainly shouldn’t be such an irritating ass about it, though. And it’s true that conservation in the developed world will be much less effective if we can’t persuade developing countries to be more eco-conscious than we’ve been.
I have my own confusion about electric/hybrid cars…
I understand that hybrids are more fuel efficent, and electric cars are zero CO2 emission, but what about the fact that the electricity for the car has to come from Somewhere.
Isn’t is true that somewhere, coal and natural fuel and whatnot being used in a powerplant to create electricity for me to use to power electric cars??? Or are the powerplants so efficent and have lower emmissons due to regulations to the point that it justifies the use of those resources being converted into electricity?
Not many people had replies. It is a valid point. Just because the U.S. cuts gas and oil use by 10, 20, or 75% doesn’t mean that it won’t get used at all. In fact, it will cause the price to go down and encourage developing countries to build an oil based infrastructure. It seems to me that every economically viable bit is going to be used up no matter what so it might as well be the U.S. partaking the most because other countries won’t develop such a dependence.
However, a counter-argument I found is that we won’t ever (meaning within several hundred years) run of oil. There are gigantic deposits still being found and tapped including Alberta, Canada’s tar sands which are just now being opened up and may have as much oil as Saudi Arabia or maybe the entire Middle East although it is much sloppier to extract. There was another gigantic deposit found in the Gulf of Mexico recently as well and it may be on-line in less than 10 years. That means that there is no end in sight to the available oil or at least not in our lifetimes and that is just based on what we know now. There are undoubtedly others and the more we use, the more aggressively the oil companies will look for sources although you could argue that we would have used those eventually anyway as well.
Exactly correct. This also applies to hydrogen cars, too, a point which is often overlooked. There are, however, some advantages.
First, with all of the burning going on in centralized locations, pollution can indeed be decreased. The CO[sub]2[/sub] we’re pretty much stuck with, unfortunately, but a well-run power plant (like, say, one that’s hired Una Persson) will have much less emission of NO[sub]x[/sub], ozone, unburned fuel fractions, and other nastiness than the equivalent number of cars.
Second, most electrical power in the US comes from coal, not oil, and we have a lot more coal available than we do oil. Estimates for how long the coal will last are generally 5-10 times longer than the corresponding estimates for oil. This isn’t really an environmental factor (all fossil fuels are about equally bad for the environment), but it is an important economic consideration.
Third, there are other options for generating electricity which don’t pollute. We already have hydroelectric power, which rivals coal (it’s actually cheaper, but there are only so many hydro plants which can be built). Technologies like wind, solar, and tidal power are approaching economic viability (some faster than others), and somewhere off on the horizon we hope to develop practical fusion power. Eventually, we’ll have truly clean energy available cheaply, and when that happens, we’ll want to run everything off of it. If we build the electric or fuel cell cars now, and the corresponding filling stations, then when we get the clean power technology, there’ll be that much less infrastructure which needs to be changed.
I liked the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? but it missed a chance for drama and honesty when they left out the fact that generating all that electricity cleanly will require… nuclear! I was kinda hoping for a big dramatic smash cut from an EC proponent to Three-Mile Island, i.e. you can have your idealistic changes, but they all have a cost.
Something to keep in mind is that by creating low-energy, low-polluting technologies, we can sometimes help developing nations hopscotch stages of development we and other industrial nations had to go through. For example, many developing countries aren’t bothering to develop landline-based telephones, and are instead building wireless transmitters. Even if they have to build power lines to the towers, eliminating all the hardware associated with a wired phone network means that communications technology takes up a lot less resources in the end. Instead of hundreds of thousands of miles of cable and switching stations, you’re only running power cables out to the towers. It’s also more scalable, takes less of a capital investment, and requires less tearing up of land. They’re receiving the benefit of our development of better, more efficient, and less resource-intensive ways of doing things. Sometimes that’s a byproduct of the technology, sometimes it’s intentional.
Considering that we consume about 9 times the fossil fuels per capita of the average developing nation, even if we used all of it extremely efficiently we’d still be contributing hugely to the problem and either denying the use of that energy to others or making it that much more difficult and expensive for them to obtain resources they might need to make their lives better. The US has about 5% of the Earth’s population and uses 25% of the fossil fuels. We live well because we hog a bunch of resources for ourselves.
It would be great if we can offset some of that by developing even more technologies that not only reduce our use of resources, but make the exploitation of those resources more efficient or even less necessary for other nations. Solar and wind power could make power available to households in nations that can’t afford the huge infrastructure associated with getting electricity from power plants out into rural areas. Keeping grid loads from increasing by using local sources of power could also make more power available for industry with the use of fewer power plants or damaging projects like the Aswan Dam turned out to be. Every advance we make in non-fossil fuel sources of energy has potential to make those viable and possibly even less-expensive alternatives for developing countries. They might not need to follow in our footsteps.