Cheap oil – Benefits have costs

Remember peak oil? And the dire predictions that the world’s oil supplies would run out, with accompanying higher energy prices? Fracking technology has rendered that alarm mute. The glut of world wide oil has driven the cost down to prices not seen in years.

You and I are beneficiaries of the oil surplus, but the benefits have costs.

Cheap gas allows us freedom of movement, a birthright of American democracy. And it’s helped the economy recover faster than it would have otherwise. This is not an accident.

When president Obama took office, one of his first directives was to encourage increased production of all forms of energy, including oil. That meant increased government subsidies for the solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas, and hydro-electric segments of energy production, as well as government focus on increased energy efficiency. His plan was a success, having political as well as economic ramifications, despite some bumps in the road, like the BP Gulf oil spill and the Solyndra bankruptcy scandal.

Until recently, American energy independence was a hot political issue going back decades, which prompted Congress to forbid selling domestically produced oil to foreign consumers.

Now, at the bidding of the big oil lobby, intense pressure is being put on lawmakers to sell surplus American oil abroad. My, how national security priorities change when there is money to be made?

Now, comes oil from Canadian tar sand deposits and shale oil, which passes through the US on its way to foreign consumers; making Keystone and now the Dakota Access pipeline hot environmental issues. In part, because steam processed oil uses several barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil.

That controversy, over producing Canadian oil in the time of a world oil glut, has morphed into highlighting an unbroken string of treaty violations with native Americans.

The downside of the oil glut is an increase in carbon based energy production, which increases carbon emissions and does not bode well for the planet’s atmosphere, which now exceeds a 400 ppm carbon dioxide level for the first time in 4.5 million years. (Nature Geoscience journal)

According to some climate scientists, 2015 was the hottest in the past 200,000 years. Even that is not sufficient warning to change the world’s energy business model?

Neither is the fact that coastal nations are actively responding to rising sea levels, by relocating whole towns to higher ground. The irony is that these nations aren’t responsible for global warming, nor have they historically benefited much from the industrial revolution, which caused the problem in the first place. But that is changing.

By 2020, there will be an estimated 6.1 billion cell phone users worldwide. (Ericsson) With billions of new consumers demanding food, cars, refrigerators, washing machines, and microwaves, putting additional pressure on world resources.

Simply put, a western style standard of living for the whole world is unsustainable. Even if it were possible, it would require the resources of eight earths. (E. O. Wilson)

Then there’s the fact that the oceans and all the animals in them are infused with tiny plastic bits. Will the day come when USDA labeling requires listing the “nutritional content” of plastics in foods?”

Now, warming seas do have an upside if you are a giant 6 foot Namura jelly fish, which has invaded the Sea of Japan, filling an ecological niche left by overfishing. Will Japanese entrepreneurs respond with “Jellyfish” McNuggets served with Wasabi?

We are irreversibly altering the ecology of the planet because there are too many people, putting too much pressure on the earth’s resources.

Population is the elephant in the room, but what politician or church leader has the courage to say that family planning is necessary for the survival of mankind? Unless, of course, one subscribes to the notion that human kind will survive anyway, if we can just colonize another planet before we wreck this one?

Every cultural, religious, and capitalist institution has to recognize that human activity has imperilled the planet’s ecology, and work to change people’s procreative behavior, before it’s too late.

Conservative stances on a host of sex related issues, like contraception, will have to recognize the reality of an unsustainable supply vs an insatiable demand for earth’s resources.

Some see this recognition of reality as an attack on their divinely sanctioned”family values.” Not so.

But it will require some adjustments, like not adulating the Duggar family’s 19 children as a “gift” from god. Or acknowledging that sex is ok, even if it’s not with procreation in mind?

More disturbing is my own changing perspective. As I approach 70, I begin to understand the attitude of some who take advantage of environmentally unsustainable prosperity, knowing full well that when the sh#t hits the ecological fan, I won’t care because I’ll be dead. But no, I can’t accept that selfish posture.

Posterity has a just claim on our individual choices, particularly in view of our acceptance of conspicuous consumption as a template for our own behavior?

Just how does one explain the insanity of Wells Fargo’s CEO being penalized $41 million for ignoring years of WF criminality in cheating its own customers, but even if he’s fired he is allowed to keep $123 million (some estimate $200 million) total from pension, deferred compensation, and stock options? (Fortune) When just under a billion people live on a dollar a day? (World Bank)

Does the collapse of Easter Island society from over consumption of the island’s natural resources hold no lesson for us?

ukiahdailyjournal.com