The Arrogance of Environmentalists

I came across this editorial in the Calgary Sun. It is both half-baked and extremely disingenuous. I couldn't resist sending the newspaper this letter:

Michael Den Tandt states that Canada must follow Barack Obama's disastrous Cap and Trade policy because "the politics and the math are unavoidable".

Really? An obvious alternative is to just offer our precious oil for sale to other countries. There will immediately be instant takers the world over.

Last year Canadians were given the opportunity to cast their vote on the political views espoused by Stephane Dion and Michael Den Tandt. They were rejected. Vehemently!

The will of the people seems to mean little to their ilk. Neither do they have any real concern for the prosperity and health & welfare of Western Canadians. For without a doubt, should such suicidal economic policies be followed, there will be major negative consequences abound.

Another Inconvenient Truth

Canada's corrupt mainstream media refused to ask The Messiah (aka Barack Obama) even one difficult question. Yet they're always quick to condemn Canada's Oil Sands. Click on the image above to read more.

Russia and the $70 Barrel of Oil

A few months ago I heard a rather foreboding prediction that if the price of oil were to drop below US$70 per barrel for too long then Russia would engage in some sort of military action in order to cause uncertainty and drive the price up. The theory behind this being that oil was their major export and source of revenue.

So periodically I check in on what oil is selling for.

Who knows if this theory is true or false. Assuming it is true, one could argue that the Russians will deliberately not do anything until after the U.S. Election on November 4th, so as to not give John McCain any extra advantage of getting elected president.

Strange times we live in.

A Reflection on Obama's Promise to End America's Dependency on Oil in 10 Years

I admire Barack Obama's determination to remove America's dependency on oil, and in just 10 years no less. It's a noble goal but is it remotely possible? Is it based on hopes & dreams or on solid practical facts?

Peter Tertzakian, a business analyst in Calgary, provides a detailed analysis of America's great dependence on oil. It's an important read.

Two-For-One Smear: The Alberta Oil Industry and Sarah Palin!

One fellow on the DailyKos has attacked the entire Alberta oil industry and Sarah Palin all in one massive shot across the bow. He condemns them both profoundly, along with the Alaska Pipeline Project. He believes that the Alberta oil industry should be shut down. Here's the executive summary of his argument:

Sarah Palin's Pipeline should be a major issue in this campaign. It is a disaster and a major scandal unfolding in real time. Here are three things that Voters should know about Sarah Palin's Pipeline deal:

1. It will cost US Tax Payers Billions of dollars.
2. It does not guarantee delivery of natural gas to US markets.
3. It will Accelerate Climate Change and the destruction of the planet.
   

Let's look more closely at what he's saying:

#1 - "It will cost US Tax Payers Billions of dollars."

Yes indeed, building infrastructure costs money. The writer knows this, of course, but wants to shock people with the "B" word. The estimated cost is $26 Billion. Here's something he neglected to mention though, taken from Page 17 of the project's executive summary:

Over the first 25 years after the pipeline is up & running, the project is expected to yield the following revenue:

• $207 billion to the Alaska Shippers after taxes and royalties;
• $131 billion to the State of Alaska;
• $52 billion to the United States federal government; and
• $17 billion to TransCanada in equity return

#2 - "It does not guarantee delivery of natural gas to US markets."

This is a downright lie. The pipeline will connect into the existing Alberta natural gas pipeline infrastructure, which itself is connected to the lower 48 states in 2 places. Stating that it will not guarantee delivery to the bulk of of the U.S. States is like saying that the electricity generated in Canadian provinces is "not guaranteed" to reach the U.S.

For endless decades there has a been a massive net import of electricity from Canada by the U.S.:
The interconnection of natural gas pipelines, including this new one from Alaska work in a very similar fashion.


#3 - "It will Accelerate Climate Change and the destruction of the planet."

In this case, he has concluded that man-made Global Warming is an undeniable fact, simply parroting talking points from the Al Gore prayer book. The statement that it's undeniable is completely false. The subject is very much an unresolved issue. The DailyKos writer didn't even bother citing any references to support his unfounded claim. I guess he figures why should one bother when denying global warming is similar in nature to being a Holocaust Denier (at least in his mind).

Any reference he did want to provide can be countered with many others that absolutely dispute this unsubstantiated claim. For starters, feel free to click here and here.

As I've stated publicly before, to assume you are absolutely correct about controversial scientific issues is the height of arrogance. To think you can intelligently debate them when you don't remotely understand the science, computer models, and mathematics behind them is the height of ignorance.

---

Should this fellow get his wish, let's look at the repercussions of what such a decision would actually mean:

1. Hundreds of thousands of families throughout Alberta would no longer have any income.
2. The economy of Alberta would instantly go into a massive depression.
3. The economy of Canada would be dramatically hurt, certainly hurting millions of families beyond just those who work directly in the oil industry.
4. The price of gasoline would skyrocket all across North America. Some facts: In 2006, the province of Alberta exported 1.08 million barrels per day of crude oil to the United States, which accounted for 13 percent of U.S. crude oil imports. Alberta also supplied the U.S. with 62 percent of its natural gas imports.
5. The cost for people to heat their homes would also skyrocket.
6. The U.S. would then have to depend even more on nations that are openly hostile toward it.

Is this really what the American people want? Does Barack Obama agree with this? I wonder how Canadian politicians, now vying for votes in a federal election, feel about this?

Editorial: Obama's views on Canadian oil don't match his country's interests

Editorial from the Vancouver Sun:

Quick now, which country is the leading supplier of petroleum to the United States? Wrong.

It's not Saudi Arabia. It is Canada by a long shot.

This year so far, the U.S. has imported more than 2.5 million barrels a day from Canada, compared with 1.5 million from the despotic desert kingdom. Last year, imports from Canada totaled 2.4 million barrels a day, compared with 1.4 million from the Saudis.

Don't take our word for it. These are figures from the June 13 report of the Energy Information Administration, which bills itself as the disseminator of official energy statistics from the U.S. government.

Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama might want to review these numbers carefully before he again condemns Canada's leading export as a "dirty, dwindling and dangerously expensive" 19th-century fossil fuel. It also happens to be the elixir of life for the U.S. economy and will continue to be long after Obama has left the Oval office -- if he ever gets there. But Obama's energy adviser, Jason Grumet, has warned that climate change trumps oil, specifically oil from Alberta's oilsands. The production of oil from the oilsands generates about three times more greenhouses gases compared to production of conventional oil, according to U.S. environmentalists.

Obama has promised to cut U.S. dependence on foreign oil by 35 per cent by 2030 and invest $150 billion US in alternative energy. "The possibilities of renewable energy are limitless," he said in Las Vegas this week. To flip Obama's campaign slogan, that's change we can't believe in. It should've stayed in Vegas.

As we have seen with President George W. Bush's effort to enhance U.S. energy security by investing in ethanol, not only are there limits to alternative energy, but disaster results from uninformed, misguided policies.

Should the U.S. follow Obama's reckless route, Canada will have no lack of customers for its oil, which will remain the world's principal energy source for many decades. But without Canadian supplies, the U.S. will become increasingly dependent on hostile or unpredictable regimes such as those of Venezuela, Nigeria, Algeria, Angola and Russia.

Obama's attack on Canada's oil industry on the heels of his pledge to abrogate or renegotiate the North America Free Trade Agreement does not augur well for Canada-U.S. relations should he succeed in his bid to occupy the White House. If his recent comments accurately reflect the direction he intends to take his country, he will put the U.S. in peril, stifle economic growth, lower Americans' standard of living and undermine the most important trading relationship in the western hemisphere.

He has a few months to sharpen up his policies and groom his team before the presidential campaign is in full swing. Replacing his energy adviser would be a good start.

Ethanol: The Answer or an Illusion?

With the price of oil now well over $100 per barrel and expected to surpass $150 per barrel by year's end, there's a lot of talk about Ethanol, which is most often made from corn. I've heard lots of comments about it, both pro and con. Generally I've been quite skeptical of it.

In favour of Ethanol are people like Robert Zubrin, who wrote Energy Victory, as well as this compelling letter to Mark Steyn. Zubrin seems like a very bright guy so I decided to investigate what it would actually take to convert the entire United States to using Ethanol.

I found this informative article by technology writer, Andrew Kantor. Out of it I pulled these figures:

• A gallon of ethanol requires 26 pounds of corn.
• An acre of land can yield 9,400 lbs. per year.
• The U.S. would require 261 million gallons of Ethanol per day

Then I did the math:

1 sq mile / 640 acres x 1 acre / 9400 lbs x 26 lbs / gal x 261,000,000 gal / day x 365 days / year = 411,717 square miles per year [of required space to grow corn for Ethanol]

Rounding up, that's 412,000 square miles that would have to be entirely devoted to growing corn to meet America's energy needs. I immediately wondered what portion of the U.S. that would encompass. Focusing in on the central farming states, I found this table and compiled the numbers:

State	Land Area	75% of Area
	(sq. miles)	(sq. miles)
Kansas	81,815	61,361
Nebraska	76,872	57,654
Missouri	68,886	51,664
Oklahoma	68,667	51,500
Iowa	55,869	41,902
Illinois	55,584	41,688
Arkansas	52,068	39,051
Tennessee	41,217	30,913
Kentucky	39,728	29,796
Indiana	35,867	26,900
Total:	576,574	432,430

Why only 75% of each state's area, you ask? It's an arbitrary number but I thought it to be a reasonable one to account for non-farming areas, such as cities, towns, and land otherwise unavailable. In some states the non-arable land may be even less but then one has to question whether the corn growing and ethanol conversion figures quoted by Kantor are absolute maximums? Given a dedicated focus on producing ethanol, I have little doubt that together, scientists, engineers, and farmers could come up with innovative ways to produce more Ethanol with less land.

So, if all of these states were to devote themselves to becoming the New Energy Source for the United States, this is what the country would look like:


Impossible, you say? I think not. In fact, given that there's a never ending demand for mobile energy (read "oil" at this time in our history), what on earth would be wrong with entrepreneurial farmers stepping up to the plate to supply that demand?! In fact, it might be just the thing to pull Americans together to work toward a unified cause that would help them both economically and defensively.

In his article, Kantor points out the side-effects of farming in general, but I firmly believe in the ingenuity of man-kind (especially engineers!) to resolve all problems before him. Where there's a will, there's a way. In fact, I rather like the metaphor of these states, in the center of the country, acting much like the heart in a human body, pushing out the industrial blood that is necessary for the country to survive and prosper.

One thing though: All subsidies to farmers should stop asap. While it's clear that producing ethanol is more expensive than the current cost of conventional oil, as the latter keeps on creeping up in price, eventually they will be on par. A forward thinking energy plan would be something akin to John Kennedy's Man on the Moon goal of the 1960's, giving farmers and communities the help they need over the next decade to make the conversion to producing ethanol. After that they'd be on their own, as the rest of us are.

The years ahead are sure to be interesting ones, but I'm optimistic!

Sleepwalking Into A Nightmare

English blogger, Melanie Phillips, has an interesting take on a recent speech by U.S. political figure, Newt Gingrich. Read it and ask yourself this: "Do any American politicians have the willpower to make such a dramatic change away from their country's dependence on foreign oil?" This seems like the perfect rallying cry for the Democrat party but I don't see one of their candidates adopting it anytime soon.

Our Addiction to Oil isn't so simple to stop

A geophysicist friend in Calgary directed me to this recent talk by business analyst, Peter Tertzakian. He's also the author of 1,000 Barrels A Second, a fascinating book that further delves into our deep dependence on oil.

The talk is lengthy - about an hour - but if you can listen to the first 15 minutes, you will gain a much better understanding of the facts behind our predicament and why much of the talk by environmentalists and politicians is nothing more than hot air.

Is truth edging out hypocrisy?

Today, on the nationally syndicated Adler Online show, Liberal MP Mark Holland admitted that, should his party get elected, they would definitely consider scaling back the tar sands operations in Fort McMurray, Alberta. You can read more about this here. The Liberal spin-masters will likely try to cover this up over the coming days but it clearly is what he said. Ooops! (Though I actually prefer hearing the truth rather than meaningless rhetoric.)