With oil prices fluctuating on fears of recession and the promise of OPEC to cut production, but still nowhere near the high of June 2008, Americans once again have the opportunity to consider how we will propel our economy. This century has seen wild jumps, from peaks during the most active parts of the war and occupation in Iraq to a low in April 2020, followed by a leap upward once more, with strenuous efforts to lay the blame on either of the two major political parties of the United States, on the contrariness of Persian Gulf nations, on Russia and Venezuela, or on increasing regulations that seek to curtail the rise in global average temperatures. The solution of the right wing, energy independence, makes for a good bumper sticker, but the reality is that with free markets, buyers will seek out the cheapest supply, and our domestic refining capacity still favors the type of oil that comes from elsewhere, which means that if we want to wall ourselves off, the process would take many years and would require government coercion far heavier than most Republicans will admit to favoring.
And if in some fantasy we could hide in splendid isolation from the rest of the world, the transformation of ancient trees into carbon dioxide and kinetic energy remains in practical terms a profligate process, a single burning of each unit of coal or petroleum. Yes, what generated these fossil fuels continues today, but we are doing the equivalent of tearing holes in the bottom of the bathtub while the faucet runs at only a trickle. Even if we reject the science of climate change, the fact of mineral resources being a finite supply should give us all more than a moment of pause.
But this means that we must strip mine mountains for rare earth elements to make the magnets for wind turbines. This means that we have to put up bird-killing wind turbines. That means that we have to dam some rivers, flooding out the land used by the chancred ground skank.
Yes. As engineers tell us, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Every form of energy generation will have some effect on the environment at some point along its lifecycle. Unless we are willing to return to a hunter-gather existence—which may not be all that harmonious after all—we are going to need power. This divides into two main categories: stationary and mobile.
I have already referred to some forms of stationary generation—i.e., a power plant that produces electricity to operate stationary consumption. The problem is that wind and solar suffer from periodic and intermittent failures of supply—the wind stops blowing; a cloud covers the sun, etc. Very well, we also need nuclear reactors, and the most promising technology in that field—until we actually get fusion working—is found in the fuel cycle of thorium.
But what about transportation? Fossil fuels have a huge advantage here in being significantly stable—they don’t explode if you bump them—while having high energy density. There are a couple of ways here to transition to much greener energy in transportation that we have available right now. For one, trains are already much more efficient than trucks, and we could power them by electricity generated from the methods above. And for vehicles that have to move independently—cars and planes—there is hydrogen. That comes with some technological challenges, and we need the infrastructure to distribute it in a manner similar to gasoline or kerosene, but these are fairly simple things to solve. And with green power plants, producing free hydrogen from the electrolysis of water ceases to have the environmental cost that current methods bring.
But all of this will cost a lot of money in the switch.
Yes. And the sooner we do it, the lower our costs will be.
From the perspective of the security conscious—and I would imagine that readers with an interest in guns for personal protection have at least some awareness of broader matters of security—we have a rapidly closing window of opportunity to preserve human civilization. That sounds hyperbolic, but there is no evidentiary doubt that we are currently pushing the planet into a condition that cannot sustain life as we in the twenty-first century developed world experience it. A post-apocalypse Earth is amusing in fiction. It would be a horror in real life.
I am sorry to say that gun owners who find themselves in the right wing all too often refuse to acknowledge what we are facing. In political terms, the costs are, in their view, too high. We would need to tax and regulate corporations, and we individual Americans would have to change out some of our possessions—gasoline-powered cars for sustainable models, for example. But if we are unwilling to do those things, we will find ourselves either in the kind of totalitarian state that should give anyone the shivers or in comprehensive collapse. We can have a future of individual rights and freedoms in a sustainable civilization, or we can find out how long each of us can live in a state of bloody nature.
The evidence of human history tells me that the latter is far shorter.
Big picture question is how many people can the planet afford to support at a First World level of energy consumption without cooking ourselves off or running out of the natural resources needed to power our lifestyle, whether via combustion, electrolysis, solar, wind, or nuclear. All have tradeoffs in energy density, i.e., the footprint of a wind or solar farm vs. a stationary source. And in waste stream.
Just wait till the rest of the world wants to see the world from the windows of a Chevrolet.
Your description of the "right wing" solution is something of a bumper sticker in itself. "Drill, Baby, Drill" shouldn't be mistaken for the extent of the solution, no matter how convenient for derision it might be. Energy independence is critical, just as a matter of disaster prep alone.
Nuclear plays a huge role in stationary power generation when it comes to what the "right wing" actually proposes, and the people I hear trumpeting nuclear power tend to be on the right, especially around thorium reactor types. It's getting easier to get our friends on the Left around to this technology, but it's nice to see things are changing on that score. Even Thunberg seems to have seen the light (or been prompted by her handlers into seeing the light).
We also currently don't have workable alternatives to petrochemical use for feedstocks, let alone energy - a point that most people simply don't grasp. Hydrogen in an energy storage medium, not an energy source - again, something else people don't seem to know. Unless the source of that energy is "green" (i.e. nuclear) then it's a fossil fuel, essentially.
For electric vehicles to be effective and ubiquitous, we need two things - cheap nuclear power, and new battery tech that avoids rare earth substances. Screaming about them being necessary won't get anywhere, and is nothing more than fantasy indulgence, at least until we have both of those items. It's not the right wing that's slowing adoption of nuclear, and the science has not facilitated the batteries we need (yet).