Tag: oil

Electric vehicles are cool but they’re not the environment savers people think

Just a friendly reminder (and I do mean friendly. no one should be angry or jerky about this) that “clean energy” uses dirty energy. Specifically: electric cars use fossil fuels…

In case you are wondering: yes, coal is a fossil fuel…

Some just try to fool the public about this but others acknowledge the dirty fuel use in clean energy but claim that vehicles reduce carbon dioxide emissions cuz they use less fossil fuel than burning gas in a vehicle engine to make it go, but… the data isn’t conclusive that that is true:

The Greenpeace / Transport & Environment report’s research states that while PHEV manufacturers cite official test results showing CO2 emissions averaging 44g per km, they actually emit more like 117g per km in real use, which is much closer to the value for petrol and diesel cars of 164-7g per km. This is because the true emissions of a PHEV depend on how you drive it. If you don’t plug it in, a PHEV behaves like a conventional hybrid, except with about 200kg more batteries, which are being lugged around for no reason. Also, if you drive a PHEV fast, the fossil-fuel engine will fire up anyway, negating the emissions benefits of battery power.

Based on these findings, Greenpeace is arguing that car manufacturers are simply using PHEVs as an excuse not to stop manufacturing polluting internal combustion engines, and that this vehicle type should be banned alongside pure petrol and diesel in a decade or so as a result. Their arguments are not completely lacking in merit. Lots of people will have purchased a PHEV for the reduced tax due to their low official CO2 emissions, and once they’ve bought the car don’t care about driving it in a way that actually produces this ecological outcome. Both the manufacturers and owners can pretend to adopt green behaviour without actually bothering to do so.

Blame Congress for high oil prices

From David Strom.

How stupid do they think we are? How is it possible to simultaneously wean ourselves from oil and the carbon dioxide emissions that stems from it, keep oil cheap and abundant, drill for oil absolutely nowhere, and sue oil companies without hurting consumers? Oh, and don’t forget to slap a “windfall profits” tax on the oil companies just for good measure.

It’s not possible to have all these “good” things together. Instead, we are seeing the consequences of following the anti-oil policies being pushed in Congress. Gas prices have gone through the roof, oil supplies for the future are threatened, and if the lawsuits against “big oil” go through exploration for future supplies will dry up leaving the world with little option but to get poorer over the next few years.

And the unpleasant fact is that a poorer world will be dirtier and less healthy for human beings, and not so great for nature either. Unless we want to concede that the earth would be better off completely without human beings—and just who would judge it so anyway?—then it is time to recognize that both human beings and the earth will be better off the wealthier we become. And for the foreseeable future, that wealthier future will depend upon drilling for oil.

Congress has been standing in the way of that better, wealthier future. By restricting prospecting for and drilling for oil within the United States, Congress has been keeping oil prices higher than they otherwise would be. And while high oil prices will help wean America off of oil eventually, our current experience shows that in the short run they just hurt consumers and help push our economy into a 1970’s-like tailspin that will make Americans less, rather than more environmentally conscious.

Oil prices will only drop if oil supplies can increase, and oil supplies can increase only if oil companies are allowed to drill for oil and be handsomely compensated for extracting and selling it.

Congress should be opening up the continental shelf and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil extraction instead of raking oil company executives over the coals for not selling their product below world market price.

Consumers will benefit only if oil companies can extract, sell, and handsomely profit from the sale of oil that is currently under ground. No amount of complaining by Congressmen can change the laws of economics that makes that so.