So the BBC was reporting tonight that the US had joined with the “oil producing states” to oppose setting targets for increased use of renewable fuels like wind and sun. Shouldn’t our gov’t be pushing for more independence from imported fuels? I suppose this could be in great debates, but I’d mainly like to know what the explanation is so I put it here.
Thanks,
PC
I work for an oil company. The big ones are researching alternative fuels, but I suspect they want it on their own time schedule. Alternative is pretty easy. Renewable is the hard part. Wind and sun have been exploited as much as the ever will be, unless something pretty dramatic happens.
Peace,
mangeorge
I work for an oil company. The big ones are researching alternative fuels, but I suspect they want it on their own time schedule. Alternative is pretty easy. Renewable is the hard part. Wind and sun have been exploited as much as the ever will be, unless something pretty dramatic happens.
Peace,
mangeorge
I haven’t seen the related news story. That’s far too nebulous a statement to debate, and I gather you’d rather have some explanation of the Administration’s position than a debate, anyway. So, can you link an article? In what venue was this position stated?
The system is self-correcting. When conventional fossil fuels become too expensive (through shortage of supply), the interest in alternatives (though not necessarily renewable) will increase accordingly. At the moment, oil is simply too cheap for anyone to go to huge lengths to establish something different. Wind only works well when you can dedicate a large plot of land in a particularly windy area to it, and solar is intruiging but won’t catch on in a really huge way until photovoltaics come down in price. Small-scale implementations are in place, but they’re dwarfed by hydroelectric (which is renewable), nuclear (which is sort-of renewable, with reprocessing) and coal (which is extremely widespread, but about as dirty a fuel as you can get). If oil prices got really high really fast, as the American saw in the seventies, interest in alternatives would spike.
Personally, I look forward to the bankrupting of the Arab oil states, but that’s more of a GD topic, or even fit for the Pit.
I can imagine canola oil producing plants replacing a sizable amount of petroleum based diesel and lubrication.
Canola has anti-oxidants which would prevent break-down of the oil, as well as no sulfur to create sulfuric acid in the exhaust.
I don’t know about canola oil specifically, but the catch with things like that is that you still need to put something in the tractor to harvest it. Can you get enough oil out of a field of canola to fuel the effort to harvest it? I doubt it.
here’s a link that may be what the OP is talking about. My speakers don’t work, so i’m not really sure.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/progs/talkingpoint/02/01sep.ram
jb
So because the oil companies are doing some research and we’re afraid we might fail to meet set goals it’s better not to have the goals? Not (of course) that I don’t trust oil companies to risk their bottom line for the greater good or anything, but how does showing support for improved environmental energy supplies hurt anyone, except maybe as competition for economies (& companies) that depend on oil (not a small consideration, granted).
PC
The U.S. didn’t just ‘oppose renewables’. They opposed a specific hard target of replacing 15% of the country’s energy sources with renewables within 10 years, or something equally drastic. When I read the original article about it, I though, “That level is insane.” There’s no way we have the right technology to replace anywhere near 15% of our energy needs with renewable power within 10 years. Not even close.
Sam Stone has the answer. The people who set the targets don’t have much of a grasp on the reality of the situation; the U.S. could never possibly meet the targets. I don’t think anybody could.
Corection: we do have the technology, we do not, however, have the insanity required.
It’s amusing to see how the United States has gone from the Kennedy era’s attitude of “Let’s put a man on the moon within ten years” to the Simpson attitude of “It’s hard so don’t even bother”
d&r
So does that mean we blocked ratification in our fight for more reasonable goals?
PC
I agree with Barbarian.
Bryan Ekers, the system may well be self-correcting, but (at the risk of sounding melodramatic) only if you ignore the fact that using non-renewable energy sources is destroying the world. Maybe we can get enough oil out of the ground cheaply enough to melt the polar ice caps, before the self-correcting aspect of capitalism kicks in. But I don’t think we should.
In general, the US doesn’t like to sign up for something that we know we can’t meet. Other countries don’t like it, but we don’t go around signing up for symbolic but unattainable targets. Same thing for the Kyoto Protocol.
Here’s an equivalent: Has your personal household yet set a target for getting 15% of its energy from renewable fuels? Why not? Does it have something to do with the fact that they’re not practical yet, and you’d have to put aside saving for your kids’ college in order to pay for them?
Bryan Ekers,
You make the same arguement that guys like Pat Bedard & Brock Yates do when they bleat and screech about alternatives to the combustion engine/alternative fuels. (Bedard & Yates are columnists for car & driver magazine.
Using your logic, we should continue to use up the world’s supply of oil as fast as possible, while at the same time, doing little or nothing in terms of fidning/perfecting an alternative fuel source. I liken that to setting a fox loose in a chikcen coop full of 1000 chickens and saying that you’ll get around to containing the fox after he’s killed off 980 chickens.
Tell me, what happens when the day comes and all of a sudden there is a 2 month supply of oil left for the entire world and that has to be divied up, and gee, maybe we’d better look into this alternative fuel thing.
Talk about cutting off your dick to see if it hurts.
I agree with you, PosterChild. Mostly, anyway. I do work for an oil company, but not in public relations. 
I couldn’t open the above link, but I assume the agreement was to set goals, not enter into a binding contract. If the US can’t meet those goals, who can? No egg on our face, IMHO, for trying.
One question;
Did the auto giants meet emission goals mandated back in, when was it, the 80’s? Heck no. They weasled those goals to something thay could handle. But did those goals prod them to move a little faster than they otherwise would have? Probably.
We should have said “OK, we’ll try”. And then give it our best shot.
“Can’t” never did nuthin’.
BTW; Households are not equivalent to governments, CurtC. Totally different dynamics.
Peace,
mangeorge
The flaw in your analogy is that it takes no significant effort for the fox in the chicken coop to catch a given chicken. Catching the last chicken is essentially no more difficult the catching the first, and there is nothing to prevent the fox from consuming all of the chickens.
There is a mechanism in place that will prevent all of the oil on Earth from being consumed: it gets harder to obtain.
While, logically speaking, there is of course a finite amount of oil on the Earth, all of the oil is not equally accessible. The supply will diminishish gradually, while the price increases correspondingly. Long before it ever runs out, oil will become too expensive to burn. Thus, we will never “run out” of oil. We will undoubtedly run out of cheap oil, though.
(BTW, I have often heard alarmists make statements like we have only a twenty-year supply of oil left. Indeed, they have been saying that since the 1970s, nearly thirty years ago.)
If you are interested in this topic, Scientific American had some pretty good coverage of the issue within the last year or so.
The point is, or at least my point is, that the time that oil becomes too expensive or difficult to extract is a function of how much oil there is in the world, and how good we are at getting to it. It is not a function of how much fossil fuel we have to burn to fuck up the environment.
So the system is not self regulating in any way that matters.
Sure it will be very difficult to extract the last 5 percent, but I’d be less concerned with the technical difficulties that Esso engineers faced if my house was under water.