toddpw

Drilling in ANWR: What's Not to Like?

Frankly I think we should preserve these for the true endgame when the rest of the world really does run out of oil, then we will be sitting on a goldmine.

Besides, local drilling is just a distraction from the real solution which is to tell the corn ethanol lobby to go take a hike, so we can fund non-food crop ethanol or even methanol, which is also useful as a fuel but the media steadfastly ignores it.

Apologies for the plug, but I found Robert Zubrin's book "Energy Victory" to be very clear-headed and scientifically credible. His #1 takeaway point is that if we got serious about driving the adoption of Flex Fuel vehicle technology, it would cost very little compared to how much competition it would open up in the liquid fuels industry.

Will the World's Central Banks Successfully Fight Inflation?

I don't agree that central banks are powerless to do anything about oil and food prices. Much of the run-up since last june comes from dollar weakness due to capital flight and the Fed's rate cutting campaign. Once that became an obvious trend, the speculators jumped in and added some amount of bubble premium to the mix.

To find out how much, all the central banks need to do is stop jawboning and actually hike rates. If there really is a substantial speculation element to the prices, then that should spook them out of the market and return commodities to a more realistic uptrend.

1,238 Billion Barrels of Oil Reserves: Is This an Oil Price Bubble?

I am surprised that nobody has mentioned the book "Energy Victory" by Robert Zubrin. I read it a few weeks ago and cannot recommend it highly enough. Some highlights:

1. Most muslims just want to live like normal people, but the wackos (the Wahhabists whose leadership is in Saudi Arabia) have been using the flood of oil money to finance their worldwide network of Jihadist schools and cells. Until we dedicate ourselves to cutting off their funding, we are engaging in a global game of whack-a-mole with an endless supply of enemies.

2. Corn Ethanol is one of the least efficient ways to implement biofuels, but it makes our corn lobby happy and the oil lobby certainly supports anything that makes biofuels look bad. Many other crops are better for producing ethanol, and methanol (which is being blatantly ignored here even though the original Ford research talked about it) can be produced from nearly any kind of organic matter. The technology already exists to burn most combinations of gas/eth/meth but it costs just a little more so the vaunted free market doesn't want to be bothered with it.

3. The "hydrogen economy" is doomed to fail once people try to figure out how to actually implement it in a cost-effective and consumer-safe way. There is too much basic physics and chemistry arguing against the viability of a hydrogen powered passenger vehicle. It's a blatant distraction and only useful for pretending to do something while denying more funding to technologies that have a real chance of working.

4. Global warming is both natural and man-made. The earth itself can handle much higher temperatures (and very early in its history, it did), but we know much less about human civilization's ability to cope with rising sea levels and the shifting of fertile regions from one place to another. For example, Iraq and Egypt used to be much greener places than they are now, but that all changed over the past 5000 years. Our current greenhouse gas emissions are not an imminent threat, but they will be if we continue to burn only fossil fuels and overload the biosphere with pollution and more carbon than it can process.