New York City, March 25, 2005

To my pleasant surprise, this Easter Friday, the New York Times editors
have
allowed an excellent OP-ED page titled - WHAT HAPPENS ONCE THE OIL RUNS
OUT?
This page may be seen as the energy equivalent of the Palm Sunday and
the
Nawruz New Year day - UN Secretary-General’s “IN LARGER FREEDOM” - I
wish it
could be seen as adding to it the aspect of - “Freedom from Oil”.

The environmental argument over drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife
Refuge has been portrayed as “tree huggers” versus “dirty drillers”.
As a matter of fact there are no trees to hug in the north coastal
plains of
Alaska, and possibly very little oil to exploit there by the dirty
drillers
either.

In “Me and My Hybrid”, Oliver Sacks writes that when he traded his
Lexus
300 ES sedan for the six-cylinder Honda Accord ECO hybrid, he started
averaging 40 miles to the gallon. Doing 20,000-30,000 miles per year,
he
saves 500-1,000 gallons of gas per year and will make up the extra cost
in a
year or two; he will also cut by half his CO2 emissions. Now, with
some
200 million cars and light trucks on the road in the US, and if even
half of
them saved as much fuel as he does now, the total savings would be 50
billion or more gallons of gas a year. - or the equivalent to 1.2
billion
barrels of oil, per year. This equals about half of the entire annual
production of oil in the United States and a fifth of what the most
reasonable estimates hold can be recovered in total from the Alaska
refuge;
a blip in US oil consumption. Sacks says that there are many ways to
save
energy but none as easy as this. For incentives he brings up creative
ways
found in other countries e.g. the UK allows clean vehicles exemption
from
the fee paid by other vehicles to enter congested areas of London
during
rush hours. He suggests for New York City a free Green Lane at bridges
and
tunnels as an inducement.

In “The Truth Beneath the Surface”, Professor emeritus of geology at
Princeton, Kenneth Deffeyes, who has was with M.King Hubbert at Shell
Oil,
when he predicted correctly in 1956 that US oil production will peak
during
the early 1970’s, points out that “Despite its size, Prudhoe Bay was
not big
enough to reverse the decline of American oil production. The greatest
year
of US production was 1970, Prudoe Bay started producing in 1977, and
never
enough to bring back the US production to the 1970 level. The Arctic
refuge, with the most optimistic estimate of equaling half of Prudhoe,
will
have even a smaller effect or rather no effect. Prof. Deffeyes says
that
geologists using the Hubbert research method have indicated that world
oil
production would reach its apex in this decade or 30-40 years after the
peak
in American oil production. He believes that this is a factual truth
and
his own independent research puts the date at 2005 or early 2006. Even
if
oil could come out from the Arctic refuge in 2008 or 2009, it would
have no
effect on our economy. He believes that the controversy over the
Arctic
refuge is a side issue - THE PROBLEM WE NEED TO FACE IS THE IMPENDING
WORLD
OIL SHORTAGE. And what can we do? “More efficient diesel automobiles,
and
greater reliance on wind and nuclear power, are well-engineered
solutions
that are available right now. Conservation, although costly in most
cases,
will have the largest impact. The United States also has a 300-year
supply
of coal, and methods for using coal without adding CO2 to the
atmosphere are
being developed”.

In “Coal in a Nice Shade of Green”. Thomas Homer-Dixson of the
University of
Toronto, and S. Julio Friedman, of the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, write about the use of ‘Green” coal as a gasification of
coal
and the sequestration underground of the resulting CO2 produced. The
process used is an integrated gasification combined-cycle facility
where you
can use any fossil fuel including coal, as well as wood chips, corn
husks,
or any biomass, strip out sulfur and heavy metals to obtain a hydrogen
rich
gas of which you strip the CO2 and inject it into geological
formations.
The US, UK and Germany, as part of a G-8 Group, are working now, with
energy
hungry and coal rich China and India, to build there this sort of
plants in
an effort to allow their industrialization “without wrecking global
climate”.

Interesting, the Homer-Dixon and Friedman article points out that
nuclear
energy is not a possible answer because if that were considered, the US
would have had to build another 1,200 nuclear power plants in addition
to
the existing 104 - or starting now one plant every two weeks until
2050.
They also point at the demand side, and the fact that policy makers and
consumers have sadly neglected to make investments in conservation and
energy efficiency.

The fourth article on the OP-ED page is by New York Times columnist Bob
Herbert and on its face deals with a rather political different topic,
nevertheless, I found here a connection in his attack on the press and
the
public being distracted by one sensational news after another - Terri
Schiavo, Michael Jackson, steroids in baseball, etc. while much more
important things happen right there in front of their nose. I was
missing
Herbert continuing by mentioning the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as
Professor Deffeyes did. The idea behind the Bob Herbert column “The
Era of
Exploitation” is that we are being bamboozled by Washington into paying
attention in the wrong direction while someone else walks away with our
past
life savings or our future - period.