Letter to the Editor: Beware of Nonsolutions to Energy Crisis
The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors will hold a hearing Tuesday morning to discuss the ongoing energy crisis in our region, state and country. With “peak oil” perhaps already here, or arriving soon — as more and more respected analysts now agree — this hearing is timely.
Offshore oil drilling is a nonsolution because it won’t help in the short term or long term. It’s all about numbers. Using the best available data, from the federal Energy Information Administration, we can see that opening up all federal waters to offshore drilling would contribute a drop in the bucket to our country’s oil supplies even by 2030 (160,000 additional barrels a day, compared with a projected consumption by 2030 of 24 million barrels per day). Offshore drilling is a distraction from the real solutions.
On the electricity side of the equation, coal and nuclear power are also nonsolutions. New coal plants for California are forbidden by a new law, Senate Bill 1368, unless they capture and store carbon dioxide emissions. This technology is not expected to be viable before 2020, if then, so new coal plants aren’t really an option.
Nuclear power has been extremely expensive in California, and the proposed new round of nuclear plants in the United States promises to be even more expensive. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that company estimates for new plants range from $5 billion to $12 billion — before construction has even begun. This is far more expensive, on an apples-to-apples basis, than the renewable alternatives (nuclear power is not, despite President Bush’s assertions, renewable).
Not to mention, new nuclear plants aren’t allowed under California law until there is an adequate federal waste storage solution, which is not likely to be completed by 2017 or perhaps far later.
So what should we do? Invest heavily in energy efficiency, conservation, sustainable biofuels, next-generation vehicles that run on electricity, and renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and wave power. These are all discussed in detail in our regional energy blueprint, available at www.cecsb.org.
These options would allow us to create a long-term sustainable energy infrastructure, more livable communities and save money in the process. They also would have far more short-term effects in our region than the nonsolutions discussed above.
We urge Santa Barbara County residents to come to the board hearing and let your voices be heard on these crucial issues.
Tam Hunt, energy program director
Community Environmental Council
» wrote on 08/21/08 @ 10:28 AM
Actually, outside the reality distortion zone that is environmental thinking in SB, drilling, clean coal, and properly engineered and regulated nuclear facilities are all very realistic partial solutions to the energy problem. The strategy to “Invest heavily in energy efficiency, conservation, sustainable biofuels, next-generation vehicles that run on electricity, and renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and wave power” is alone insufficient to meet even a tiny fraction of our needs within the next 10 years. Think about it realistically - how quickly will the millions of gasoline-powered automobiles be replaced with something that truly has a smaller energy footprint? Electric cars require electricity. Electricity must be generated. How ya gonna do it? Wind and waves? Not in nearly sufficient quantities.
» wrote on 08/21/08 @ 12:17 PM
So, the CEC wants us to power our cars and trucks with windmills and wave power. And these people want us to trust them with our future?
80% of the oil we consume is turned into gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel. Very little, less than 1%, is used to produce electricity. Windmills ( I love the quixotic irony) will do nothing to power our motor vehicles and aircraft.
The CEC also wants us to turn the world’s farmland into biofuel fields. Millions would starve if we did that.
Perhaps they wish for us to drive electric cars. We’ve already gone through that. Electric cars don’t work. That’s why you don’t see people driving them.
There are 10 billion+ barrels of oil off California’s coast. There’s at least that much in and off Alaska. There’s a trillion+ barrels of shale oil in Colorado and Utah. Producing conventional oil from California, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico gives us 20 years to perfect shale oil technology.
» wrote on 08/21/08 @ 02:23 PM
I wonder how many years of education is required by the CEC, allowing it to understand that ELECTRICITY IS NOT A SOURCE OF ENERGY, only a means of transportation of other forms of energy generation!!
» wrote on 08/21/08 @ 06:55 PM
Good point, Jack. I wonder if education in Environmental Science, or whatever it’s called, requires any education in Physics or Economics.
» wrote on 08/22/08 @ 01:36 AM
This is a repackaged (or recycled for the PC crowd) rant from his last opinion piece which wasn’t that long ago. How about a fairness doctrine for Tam, Capps et al. Just because they keep repeating the same highly questionable, skewed, and hypothetical “statistics” doesn’t make it true. Their rhetoric is tiresome and insults the intelligence of all with even a modicum of common sense.
» wrote on 08/22/08 @ 02:11 PM
Folks, please read our energy blueprint for our county, available at http://www.cecsb.org ("A New Energy Direction"). It addresses most of your points plus many more. Re offshore oil reserves, the EIA, which I cite above, is as mainstream as it gets. They are the official federal agency tasked with assessing oil reserves and all other energy information (as the name would imply). One more time for those who don’t realize the import of the EIA figures (or those who choose not to believe them): opening up ALL federal waters for drilling will yield 1/3 of one percent of our cumulative national demand between now and 2030. In other words, the EIA projects 160,000 barrels a day total production from new OCS lands by 2030, compared to a US demand projection of 24 mbpd. It doesn’t get any more clear than this. Offshore drilling is a distraction and a non-solution. Electricity is indeed an energy carrier - but wind, solar and wave technologies can extract energy from the environment to produce power for our homes and businesses. And when electric vehicles and plug-in hybirds start coming online over the coming years, electricity will be able to replace petroleum as a transportation fuel. This will take some time, but it’s our best long-term option. Short-term, conservation and energy efficiency are our best options for saving money on energy costs and ultimately bringing prices down. I’d be happy to talk to anyone in depth on these issues, either via email or on the phone: of 963-0583, x. 122.