Nobody Cares How the Energy Crisis Gets Solved 28 comments
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Most Americans don't think much about our present energy crisis, we just want it to end.
We couldn't care less if:
1. Successive Presidents issued executive orders to continue a moratorium on oil and gas exploration on the Outer Continental Shelf [OCS] when oil was plentiful and cheap.
2. How many Congresses followed up with their own annual bans accomplishing the same thing.
3. How much present acreage on public lands above or underwater oil companies already have leased.
4. How much money American oil companies make, as long as they spend it exploring and producing American oil and gas.
5. How long it will take oil from the OCS and ANWR to get here, so long as the government stands out of the way and it's quick.
6. How much money it will take to develop the oil shale deposits in the Rocky Mountains, just spend it.
7. Whether our cars run on gasoline or CNG or electricity, just do it now.
8. How many nuclear reactors, wind farms or solar panels we need to ensure a reliable electric supply, just build them all.
9. How we use coal, as long as reasonable efforts are taken to minimize its adverse effects.
10. How Items #1-9 are accomplished, so long as our government drops whatever else it's doing and allows it all to start today!
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This article has 28 comments:
Much is at stake. A whole new lifestyle, a whole new way of life or more of the same...we shall see
Suggest the author stop reading political polemics and begin reading petroleum geologists reports. Should also acquaint himself with the 'law of receding horizons', and other salient aspects of REALITY rather than focusing on the fantasies listed above, to wit: oil shale/tar sands, big oil companies and their profits (the nationalized oil companies now control the market), ERoEI, OCS/ANWR facts, oil rig technology (esp. deepwater) and current availability, etc.
I have to say, this list epitomizes precisely why "we" will not "solve" the "energy crisis" - it's a perfect example of how deeply Americans are in denial, and how lacking in critical thinking skills is our legacy from public schools. To demand simple solutions to incredibly complex problems is not productive.
Note that there is not a SINGLE measure on the list which proposes any sort of conservation, or readjustment to a lower level of per capita energy usage. Astonishingly myopic and utterly fantasy-driven.
As to EnergyStar talking about global warming... well, what can you say. Go back to point one about learning critical thinking skills. If you do a ton of research outside of the normal propaganda circle of government-sponsored scientists, and apply critical thinking to the evidence, you have no choice but to come to the conclusion that global warming is, at best, really bad science. At worst, it is an attempt by the powers that be to gain greater control of our citizens and our marketplace. The saddest thing is, it's working.
"Sacrifice for the greater good" was the guiding principle of the failed socialist economies of the world. And, with masses caught up in the lie of climate change, it is soon to be America's epitaph as well. I know you're trying to do a good thing, your motives are noble -- but they are taking advantage of your noble aspirations by convincing you to sacrifice your freedoms on the Altar of Climate Change. Turn those aspirations to the real good, and fight these charlatans who would deprive our children of their economic futures.
You need to do your OWN critical thinking. Critical of the talk show boys you are probably listening to.
I'm pretty conservative, but have always thought conservatives should conserve resources as well as the values and traditions that made this country great.
What is conservative about spending our resources like there's no tomorrow, leaving nothing for our children and grandchildren?
You challenge the idea that there is an actual shortage in energy. Again, I say, engage your critical thinking and don't just accept the idea that our country has "plentiful" reserves of oil. It depends on what you mean by that. I heard one guy on the radio say we have a TRILLION barrels of oil in this country. That is laughable. Best industry estimates are that there are one trillion barrels of recoverable oil left in the WORLD. In fact, U.S. *proven* *recoverable* oil is around 21 billion barrels. LOOK IT UP. This guy on the radio was throwing together the most optimistic figures (not proven recoverable reserves, but the wildly high estimates of possible reserves, without regard to recoverability) along with oil shale, tar sands and everything else he could think of, to make his case. If you look at history, the oil we actually get out of the ground is much closer to the estimates of proven recoverable oil than to the estimates of possible oil that he was using.
In one sense he had a point, and so do you. "Oil" as a natural resource IS plentiful in the ground in various places. But the conventional, recoverable oil that drives our economy, that we used to be able to extract for such a cheap price, is becoming scarce. Unconventional oil can be recovered and used to some degree, but it costs more both in dollars and in energy. Thus, our crisis is one of a shortage of the cheap energy we've grown used to having.
Everything ozzy43 mentioned has a HUGE impact on the discussion. I hate to be personal, but it is clear he is far more educated than you are on the subject. EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Investment) is the measure of how much net energy you get after you spend the energy to get the stuff out of the ground and refine it. For unconventional sources, EROEI is very low. Most of the oil shale (not actually oil, but kerogen) for example, may not even have an EROEI that makes it worth extracting. Though some of it does, it takes huge investments in capital and time to get a relatively slow flow of oil.
The real charlatans are the ones spreading these lies about how we don't need to conserve, and how if we only drilled on our own land we would be home free. They are the ones encouraging that we use up our children's and grandchildren's resources LITERALLY like there's no tomorrow. They are the ones threatening our children's economic future.
I refer you to theoildrum.com, energybulletin.com, and various factual information you can look up for yourself on the Internet. Look for the fundamentals. Cut through the hype. The reality is that cheap oil is gone FOREVER... or at least until we find an alternative technology that is cheaper.
I also did not cite conservation as the "real" solution - two straw men in one post, goin' for the record I guess.
But to take conservation off the table - which seems to be the general argument, near as I can tell - in a time of at least *apparent* supply issues going forward (well, if you listen to those dangfool petroleum geologists - but then what do they know compared to us smart investors??), is, to put it mildly, foolhardy.
Whatever happened to the notion that adapting to changing conditions was a wise thing to do, even one of the things that made humans 'masters' of the planet?
I do know this - regarding this astonishing assertion:
"Oil as a natural resource is plentiful in our country -- remove the government/environment... blockades and our increased production of oil will drive prices down for a long time to come."
That's not supported by fact, evidence or data (nor is any provided to back it up). The amount of oil left in this country is either 1) too small to make much of a diff, or 2) too difficult to get to for it to be economically feasible (i.e. ERoEI too low). Lots and lots of info at theoildrum.com and other similar sites.
If you wish to disagree with the majority of petroleum geologists (the ones NOT currently consulting to the international oil companies), then listen to what Matt Simmons, Chairman and CEO of the biggest energy investment bank out there, says. This guy is no 'government scientist' nor 'wacko environmentalist'. Read his 'Twilight in the Desert' for a full treatment. In the meantime, here's a brief item in 'The Economist':
www.economist.com/peop...
Magical thinking is the opposite of critical thinking. Stick to the latter for planning, the former for hoping.
I hope we can all agree that we won't be burning oil forever. That at some point we will have to transition away from oil to other sources of energy, preferably renewable and clean ones, which don't run out.
THEN WHAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH MAKING THE STINKING TRANSITION NOW?!?
If peak oil predictions are right, then we may just save ourselves (though it may be too late by some predictions).
If peak oil predictions are wrong, we are prepared that much sooner. AND we save money in the long run.
Studies have shown that investing in renewable energy saves money over the long range. Even with relatively expensive solar panels, those who have "bitten the bullet" and installed them in spite of their high cost have usually ended up glad that they did, even economically speaking. The problem is that the payback is usually too far out for most people's economic thinking. All they can see is the big up-front cost.
As a society, shouldn't we be steering in the direction of technologies that have a long-term future? What is it with people that they want to just blow this all off, act like there's nothing wrong with burning up precious resources like there's no tomorrow, and only pay lip service to alternatives?
Finally, this is also a matter of national security. Our dependence on foreign oil is crippling. It bends our national policy, limits our options in dealing with certain countries, and exports our wealth. We use 21 million barrels per day, but only produce about 8 million per day.
If you think we can close that gap, more than doubling our current production, by drilling more and using our own national resources, you are dreaming. After U.S. production peaked in the 1970s, we started drilling frantically right and left, but that didn't halt the decline in oil production. Adding the "vast" oil riches of Alaska was the biggest thing we could manage, and that only provided a bump up on the downward slope of production. Drilling offshore or in the Arctic will be a similar bump on our downward slide. It would take HUGE national effort, plus luck (that all the optimistic projections are true) just to halt the current slide in production. And to make up the 60% gap between our production and our usage? Don't delude yourself.
Sure, go ahead and drill, don't leave ANY resources for our children, but at LEAST at the same time make an AGGRESSIVE effort to find alternatives! There is no other way we can become truly energy independent.
Back to the energy discussion, I encourage anyone interested in issues of resource availability to view Dr. Albert Bartlett's lecture on Arithmetic, Population and Energy.
The key concept is simple. Have you ever wondered how our economies could continue to grow infinitely into the future, in a finite world? That seems to be the view of most economists. Certainly we have improved efficiency and have overcome many of the limitations we have faced in the past. And we will overcome many more. Our human ingenuity is amazing. Yet if you project infinite growth into the future, it becomes obvious that you will eventually hit limitations that you cannot overcome. If our population grows at 2% per year, in several hundreds of years we will have one person per square meter on the earth. Now obviously that's not possible, so sometime before then, our growth will have to stop. Either we stop our growth intentionally, or we hit some fundamental limitation that we cannot overcome, and we crash. If you want to deny this, please exit the land of rational thought.
If that's true, most Americans will be sorely disappointed. It will only end when we break our dependency on fossil fuels. And that probably means *gasp* a change in our lifestyles! Oops, that violates the concept of our God-given right to do whatever the &*# we please. Forget I mentioned that...
"6. How much money it will take to develop the oil shale deposits in the Rocky Mountains, just spend it."
What if it takes more money than we have? Where is the limit? What if we spend hundreds of billions and only get a relatively small flow from it?
"8. How many nuclear reactors, wind farms or solar panels we need to ensure a reliable electric supply, just build them all."
Now that's something I can agree with. We will need them all, and will probably still have to accept a lower energy budget than we are used to.
"9. How we use coal, as long as reasonable efforts are taken to minimize its adverse effects."
Actually, most Americans don't seem to care even if we don't do ANYTHING about its adverse effects, though they should. They should also care that our coal won't last us "200 years" like most people think it will. Exponential growth will cut that down to 60 years or less, people, it's basic math...
"10. How Items #1-9 are accomplished, so long as our government drops whatever else it's doing and allows it all to start today!"
AMEN to the idea of focusing on this as a national priority.
I don't agree with the idea that drilling more will save us. If we drill as part of the package, I won't mind. But if all we do is focus on drilling and only pay lip service to the rest, we are doomed. There's just not enough there for us to close the gap.
All people do breathe the same air, they just tolerate pollution to different degrees. Most Californians would not wear masks and tolerate industrial China.
People who just had to drive a Hummer till last month and then at $4.50 parked it with a tear in their eye don't care how we bring down the cost.
People who couldn't wait to get their hands on a Prious, and are current with all the advances in electric cars do care how energy is produced.
Only the stupid animals who cannot reason all the variables, know with a singular mind that walking too close to the cliffs edge is hazardous to your health.
Aug 07 11:23 AM
Starting with the published interview above (knowledgable folks) and then most commentators in media including bloggers, etc., we get a lot of discussion about price, availability, clean, dirty, foolish, carbon, global warming, alternativves, generation, transportation, etc., but no one talks about the real problem in BURNING OUR NATURAL HYDROCARBONS (COAL, OIL, NATURAL GAS, TAR SANDS, OIL SHALE);
BURNING THE HYDROCARBONS WASTES 70% OF THE CONTAINED ENERGY (in both power generation and transportation).
That, folks, all you financial guys included, is like throwing away 70% of your profits, or earnings, etc.
For those paying for shipping, it's like wasting 70% of the tanker loads.
For drillers, how would you like to drill 70% fewer holes???
DUH!!!!
Get familiar with this chart: it's your future.\:
static.seekingalpha.co...
caio.
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nakedjaybird
Aug 07 11:26 AM
And, for those of you not quite aware: GUESS WHO IS PAYING FOR ALL THAT WASTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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nakedjaybird
Aug 07 11:34 AM
Go T. Boone - get those windmills installed AND THEN the solar; stop burning NG and COAL; beef up the electrical grid by 50-75%.
Go Warren B. - electrify those railroads.
Go Bill Gates - give Warren back his money to electrify the inter/intrastate hiways, beltways for people and goods ferries.
And Boone, burn biodiesel instead of NG in those hybrids outfitted with solid state waste heat direct conversion to electrity devices for 100% useful energy.
Now, go to work.
Very refreshing.
PS - meant to say for Boone to burn biofuels, not just biodiesel in his vehicles (of any size).
There are plenty of people here who would be perfectly happy to see gasoline at $9 to $11 a gallon "just like in Europe". They figure then people would drive less and "quit destroying mother earth...".
It is true that as prices slide, people use more...they want cheap gasoline.
California gas is formulated to pollute less, but it tends to give very poor mileage...so to make up for the loss of mileage you have to buy more gas. It is a delight to go to Arizona or Nevada, and load up gas...it gives better mileage, and costs about 50-55 cents per gallon less.
T. Boone has some pretty good ideas, but they won't solve the "crisis".
I see little to no evidence of this happening on a sufficient scale, and plenty of evidence - e.g. some of these comments and innumerable others in various SA articles - that there is a powerful resistance to accepting this reality, and that this resistance persists at all levels of our society, including among the ludicrously worthless and venal political classes. Denial, illogic and magical thinking (the miracle of human ingenuity can solve ANY problem! Wheee!) continue to reign supreme here in America. Thus, while I agree with Allen wholeheartedly in his assessment of the 'problem', I am considerably less optimistic about the outcome of the "solutions".
Many have proven willing to switch to a Prius - few are willing or even able to switch to a bicycle, and that's the level of change - not change, but *convulsive* change [ref: Kunstler] - that needs to be undertaken to avoid a probable outright collapse.
Every non-renewable - oil, gas, uranium, coal - faces near term depletion, especially if we make the huge moves to them that wouild be needed, while attempting to sustain anything close to current usage patterns. Regarding the '200 year' supply of coal - how can so few understand the implicit clause here: "at present rates of consumption"?? Also, the underlying fossil fuel platform is necessary to locate, mine, extract, process and distribute all of these. And environmental consequences, en masse, for many of these 'cures' - like coal-to-liquids, or synfuels - could easily be worse than the disease.
What I'd like to understand is: what part of NON-RENEWABLE, what part of FINITE, do the folks who think we can drill or mine or build our way out NOT understand?
Biofuels also are hugely problematic in terms of ERoEI, scarce land (you wanna eat or drive? or, which nation shal we starve so we can keep driving?) and the fact that fossil fuels supply the feedstocks for Industrial agriculture as it is practiced today.
Solar, wind, geothermal, by all means (I'm not only invested in these monetarily, I am preparing to BUILD them in real life). The primary problem with these is 1) the time they will require to scale (decades), and 2) the cheap fossil fuel platform upon which these, like all 'alternatives', depend utterly to manufacture and deploy.
All these options, combined together *intelligently* (I guess these days it doesn't go without saying), may - *may* - be able to *soften* the blow that is coming, at least in some areas, but at this late date they most assuredly cannot be ramped in time to *replace* - and that fact leads to an ineluctable discontinuity which will manifest itself in the collapse of at least *some* of the systems currently totally reliant upon cheap oil to function (e.g. suburbs, transport, big box retail, agricultural/grocery, computer, pharmaceutical systems, for starters - and did I mention the military?). Once you begin to grasp the degree to which these systems that, to a large degree, comprise that which we call 'society', are interconnected (read: interdependent), you will grasp the fact that collapse of one, or two, or several, means the likely collapse of others, then others, etc - the domino effect, at the least creating a powerfully destabilizing affect across society, with attendant severe political, economic and social dislocations. The same thing that makes networking - interconnectedness - so powerful is the thing that makes it so vulnerable. More on this notion and how it ties into the energy debate here:
anz.theoildrum.com/nod...
You see, what is not clearly understood in the discussion of 'alternatives' to oil is inherent in this misleading nomenclature itself. These technologies are not so much *alternatives* to, as they are *derivatives* of, oil. Try making a PV panel without oil - or a wind turbine. Or cooking oil out of kerogen without vast fossil fuel inputs.
It is difficult to imagine that we could have devised - in full knowledge - a tighter trap than the one in which we find ourselves.
Now add one final straw to this energy camel's back:
To accomplish these things which can soften the blow - to ramp renewables, migrate oil/gas to nuclear/coal/etc as part of a sensible, coordinated transition - and to do it in a way such that the pieces function together and support each other along the way (thus creating new and more sustainable interdependencies): this will cost a truly stupendous amount of money (IEA says $45T to halve CO2 by 2050 - how much more to radically restructure, replacing wholesale the fossil fuel platform which undergirds and interconnects every aspect of our society?).
Not to mention, properly functioning global capital markets, which at the moment seem to somewhere off beyond the horizon.
But we have no money. We are no longer the affluent society we used to be. Has nobody awakened to this fact? America today is like one of the dotcom companies that promised huge profits way off in the future but is flat broke and leveraged up to its eyeballs today and for the foreseeable future. To say that we are broke is not going far enough - we have also bankrupted our children and their children after them in our quest to perpetuate the New American Dream (read: our unsustainable lifestyles). And the very same agency which is primarily responsible for our vast pauperism thanks to nearly a century of reckless disregard - the wildly out of fiscal control, drunken sailor on shore leave federal government [coupled with its best friend the counterfeiting, inflation-generating, purchasing-power-annih... Fed] - is the agency to which so many now wish to turn for succor, the agency with which many plead: 'do something!!'! It has done something. It has, with our willing and often eager participation, effectively destroyed us. That's what happens when you feed the hand that bites you. So to speak.
Remember after all that peak oil is not the sudden absence of oil. It will decline, but there will still be enough oil, in my opinion, to allow us to transition. Granted, our economy may be in shambles by the time we attempt serious switchover to alternatives, but it's not like there will be no oil with which to create the photovoltaics. That's what gets me about some people like Kunstler. They get a little too carried away with themselves and don't give hardly _any_ room for human inventiveness and ingenuity.
I agree that our lifestyles will have to be severely curtailed, but I think the impetus for that will first be economic depression before a seriously severe shortage of oil. I do see a transition to a post-oil economy, a very bumpy one at this rate, and ultimately, a lifestyle that provides for our needs but is far from the profligate lifestyles of the present.
The main barrier to our starting this transition is the refusal to accept reality by the majority and especially the politicians. I don't think this barrier can stand up for more than a few years longer.
I have no doubt that demand destruction will have an impact, and that particular game may be played over and over several times in the coming months and years - as oil inexorably continues its long term upward trend, absent some quasi-miraculous change in the fundamentals. But every time it does, a vast sigh of relief, a back-pedaling of pressure for *real* change will accompany it. This 'refusal to accept reality' which you and I both see so clearly, will thus perpetuate itself. I can see it happening already. What evidence is there that at some point, people will in fact wake up? Perhaps you see some - I do not. In point of fact, large elements of our socio-political system - educational, corporate, political - are designed to indoctrinate us into being willing believers of political and historical and economic mythologies - we are unknowingly cloaked by our illusions, here. Our refusal to accept reality is no accident - it is a natural and entirely intended by product of the cultural conditioning to which we are subjected from the moment we are born. I don't see this changing any time soon.
Further, it's not peak oil that should concern us - in the end, that won't matter - it's peak *exports*.
www.energyandcapital.c...
If we'd hit this patch 15 or 20 years ago (back before I gave up on the hopelessly corrupt political process), I would probably not have been as gloomy. But the past few years have demonstrated - I think conclusively - that enough of the American populace has been so thoroughly conditioned, that when depression comes, our response will be - predictably - wrongheaded, jingoistic, confused, inarticulate (much like many of the posts we see here on SA about energy) and - in the end - violent. We've already seen a foretaste of the scapegoating and saber-rattling impulses that accompany such events, after all. Just a pale shadow of things to come.
The Carter Doctrine remains in effect - it is difficult to imagine that our politicians - knaves and rascals that they are - would *not* use the military to go get 'our' oil once severe dislocations begin to occur (thus threatening their hold on power, or offering the political opportunists among them a shot at power via this path) - the public will *demand* it. And the politicians will respond as they always do. We'll go after the 'evildoers' who are conspiring against and imperiling American national security interests. Man, won't that be righteous?
I'm certain this sounds outlandish to most, but in my view, it's entirely within the realm of plausibility. So history assures us. And we are no more creatures free of the lessons of history than we are creatures free of the limits of nature.
So will there be oil? Absolutely - but will we have access to it? I am not so sure.
I think the Saudis have been playing a careful game of recent years, and this is the transition time for them - even the most dense observers will soon realize that Saudi production has been flat since '05 - despite repeated assurances that 'more's-a comin' - we promise!' The time when they need to begin to - carefully - distance themselves from their former best-bud/best-customer... supplier, the US, and move away from the commodity driven pricing regime to bilateral agreements which will drastically alter the game. Where we will be just one of several bidders, and *they* will have the leverage. More on this here:
www.clingendael.nl/pub...
IMO, Iraq was intended to serve notice as a demonstration of American power, which could be leveraged to secure favorable status for such agreements. That is, this was our opening gambit in the resource wars to come, intended to secure a prime position for us going forward. Instead, it turned into a demonstration of the *limits* of American power - and in turn has considerably diminished our leverage. We thought we had -and led with - the Ace of trumps - we did not realize the rules of the game had changed. So sad. We forgot to learn from history (and not for the first time).
Maybe you are right. Perhaps not. I hope you are. I don't want to be right this time. Time will tell.
www.stopoilspeculation.../
And SIGN THE PETITION????? Do It If You Want Lower Gasoline prices.
>
> That's not supported by fact, evidence or data (nor is any provided
> to back it up). The amount of oil left in this country is either
> 1) too small to make much of a diff, or 2) too difficult to get to
> for it to be economically feasible (i.e. ERoEI too low). Lots and
> lots of info at theoildrum.com and other similar sites.
>
>
> Magical thinking is the opposite of critical thinking. Stick to the
> latter for planning, the former for hoping.
I don't consider estimates from 118 billion to 215 billion barrels of recoverable oil in America to be "magical thinking" that oil is plentiful in this country. I consider it to mean: oil is plentiful in this country. Add to that the fact that we simply *don't know* how much of the 2 trillion barrels in the Bakken Formation is actually recoverable... and the technology to recover it is advancing, so the potential there is huge.
www.ibdeditorials.com/...
Apologies if I misread your post regarding conservation. I am currently frustrated by our politicians, and I probably projected some of that frustration onto you.
I am not against conservation, by any means. I am against crushing our economy in the *name* of conservation. Based on the available data I've seen, it appears there is enough oil to last our planet well over a hundred years (some estimates range to over 200 years). To me that says the conservation "issue" is a chimera. Other technologies will advance and truly become viable in that 100-200 year time frame. Why is there so much panic NOW? By the time there's a real oil shortage, we won't need it anymore.
I agree we need to explore other technologies, but I believe we need to do so on a rational basis, not a hysterical OMG-the-sky-is-falling basis (not accusing you of this, again, this is directed moreso at the politicians and environmental fascists).
As to global warming, which again was directed at another poster, this is for all the people who foolishly believe that "science" supports warming theory:
www.climatescienceinte...
Incidentally, I don't know where you get this 2 trillion figure for the Bakken formation. The USGS just this year put out an estimate of 3 to 4.3 billion: (www.usgs.gov/newsroom/...). Your figure is almost 1000 times higher!
Historically, these wildly optimistic projections do not come true; the actual economically recoverable oil tends to stay BELOW the P50 estimate. (Estimates of recoverable oil tend to come in 3 figures: the P95, P50 and P5 figures. A P95 estimate of 500 million barrels indicates a confidence of 95% that we would recover at least that amount of oil; in contrast, a P5 estimate of 90 billion barrels indicates just a 5% chance of recovering 90 billion barrels.)
However, I have noticed a lot of talk-show boys and the like trumpeting how we have TRILLIONS of barrels of domestic oil "just waiting around to be extracted". To get these figures they quite often throw together the most wildly optimistic estimates they can find, usually the P95 estimates plus wildly optimistic estimates of oil we could recover from non-conventional sources such as oil shale, which have not been successful commercially to date.
They cobble together these wild estimates and then throw the numbers around as if they were undeniable facts. All of this is POLITICALLY MOTIVATED. I say, beware. If we do end up with a crisis and we are not ready, it will largely be because of this disinformation. Again, I'm generally conservative but I really am getting disgusted with the political degradation of the discussion here on both sides including the Republicans.
Find out the facts for yourselves, folks... don't believe these figures of "trillions" that are just thrown around for political gain.
Thanks for all the research on the Bakken. Let's take the Bakken off the table for the sake of discussion.
There are still at least 118 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the US. Probably more, because there are plenty of unexplored areas. And there simply is NO good argument against going and getting it. The only argument the environmentalists have is the ridiculous non-sequitur of: "Save the planet, let another country drill!"
There are only positives in recovering our own resources, and only negatives in continuing our dependence on foreign oil. Dreamland crap from T. Boone Pickens about "wind farms" isn't going to help us either. (T. Boone has billions of dollars in stranded resources in his wind investments -- he's running his multi-million dollar ad blitz in an attempt to save his own ass -- not in an attempt to save ours.)