Fossil Fuels and Mankind

[Locutus]

Posted on June 21, 2015 by Euan Mearns

It has become popular to demonise fossil fuels (FF). Pop stars, press, politicians and now Pontiffs speak with a single voice:

We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas needs to be progressively replaced without delay. Until greater progress is made in developing widely accessible sources of renewable energy, it is legitimate to choose the lesser of two evils or to find short-term solutions. But the international community has still not reached adequate agreements about the responsibility for paying the costs of this energy transition.
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Page 122 paragraph 165 of ENCYCLICAL LETTER LAUDATO SI’ OF THE HOLY FATHER FRANCIS ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME

In this post I want to take a brief look at what FF have done for humanity and the environment. I will argue that in the 19th Century, FF first of all saved the whales from extinction and then through averting whole sale deforestation of the planet’s surface FF saved multiple ecosystems from destruction and as a consequence averted the extinction of thousands of species.

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Figure 1 Population growth (blue line), right hand scale. Fossil fuel consumption (million tonnes oil equivalent) left hand scale. The exponential growth in population would not have been possible without FF. We all therefore owe the fabric of our society and our very existence to the use of FF over the past century or more.

Energy and Man

Every human being on Earth requires energy to survive (see list on Figure 1). Be it a handful of rice for the poorest Bangladeshi or the excesses of suburban life in the West, everything we do requires energy and in 2014 86% of that energy came from FF and 11% from legacy hydro and nuclear plant. Only 3% came from alternative sources. Worryingly, in a step back towards 19th century squalor, much of that 3% came from felling and burning forests.

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Figure 2 This chart shows per capita productivity (a proxy for income) on the Y-axis and per capita energy consumption on the X-axis. The data for each country represent a time series starting in 1970 and normally progressing with time towards greater income and energy consumption. It is plain to see that there is great disparity in the per capita income and per capita energy consumption between countries. As a general rule, developing countries are striving to become wealthy like the OECD and hence show year on year growth in income AND energy consumption. See for example China, Turkey, Brazil and Belarus. To become more wealthy and more prosperous, in the common sense, requires us to use more energy.

It is simple and simplistic to make the argument that there should be a more equitable distribution of wealth and energy consumption. It is certainly rational to propose the reduction of waste and improved energy efficiency in the west. But competition and survival of the fittest is in our genes and makes us who we are. And there are certain benefits that flow from the wealthy to the poor, inoculation against deadly infectious diseases to name but one.

I am not arguing here in favour of greater polarisation of wealth but merely making the observation that it is a natural consequence of the socio economic models that appear to have served us well. I would warn against the growing politics of envy.

To become wealthy, the poor need access to clean drinking water, sanitation, food, and housing. All this requires energy and natural resources. The simplest and most economic way to provide this is through coal or gas fired power stations and the construction of electricity grids. To deny the poor access to FF is to condemn them to poverty for ever. It is fantasy to believe that the poor can be made wealthy (in the sense that the OECD is wealthy) by deployment of expensive and intermittent renewable energy. Like us, they may become wealthy only from using cheap, reliable and predictable energy supplies. This is not to say that there is no place for niche deployment of renewable energy in some developing countries.

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Fossil Fuels and Mankind | Energy Matters

 

[grainfedpraiboy]

I am not anti fossil fuel per se. I make a pretty good living from it indirectly. However, while fossil fuels have helped to lift humanity to unprecedented levels it has been a false economy that will one day catch up with us.

For example, of every single calorie you eat it is estimated that you are consuming 10000 petro calories. That is the energy it takes to plant, fertilise, grow, harvest, transport, process, manufacture, and package your food. This is unsustainable and we are essentially eating fuel but it is this easy access to abundant and inexpensive calories that have fostered a population explosion that won't begin to slow until the middle of this century.......maybe.

Excess use of fossil fuels and their derivatives such as fertilisers are changing the climate and altering the ph of the oceans. Plastics that never actually breakdown are disrupting the food chain and are poisoning the environment to such an extent that every human on the planet now has plastic coursing through their veins. Millions of litres of used motor oil laced with heavy metals are dripped or dumped on the ground while pollution from the burning of these fuels results in hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide and millions more have their health impacted and life expectancy reduced.

Fossil fuels got us here but we need a new energy source to take us forward.

 

[Cliffy]

 

[coldstream]

Fossils fuels are not only the most abundant, efficient, technologically advanced source of energy.. they are by far and away the cleanest.. especially when compared to the massively inefficient and environmentally destructive sources such as solar, wind or biofuels.

Fossil fuels represent the only true source of abundant power for the forseeable future.. the onset of fusion power being a potential replacement.. but that will certainly not be until the latter part of this century... if then.

With AGW being now a proven Fraud.. a political and philosophical con job.. there's nothing to worry about. The old warning that we will run out of fossil fuels.. the previous fear mongering of the radical environmentalists.. was disproven and discarded decades ago. You wonder what the nut jobs in the enviro cult will come up with nest.

In fact the only thing we have to fear.. is fear itself.. continually whipped up by the pagan barbarians of depopulation and deindustrialization.

 

[taxslave]

If the end of fossil fuel consumption is near we must process and sell as much as we can while it still has some value.

 

[Blackleaf]

There's still loads of coal under England, as well as all that shale gas waiting to be fracked. We should re-open the coal mines and get fracking that shale gas.

It's just simple common sense.

 

[Curious Cdn]

You will be forced to open up the pits again after the petroleum is all gone in a few generations. The gas will be long since tracked by then.

 

[Blackleaf]

You will be forced to open up the pits again after the petroleum is all gone in a few generations. The gas will be long since tracked by then.

North Sea oil is running out. That's an important reason to get coal mining again. Mighty Britain once produced a significant proportion of the world's mined coal and the industry employed a million people at its height and, with a lot of the coal still there, there's no reason why this can't happen again.

We also need to start fracking the estimated 1,300 trillion cubic feet of shale gas that sits under Northern England alone.

The greens' silly, useless, but expensive windmills blighting the countryside need to be pulled down.

Heartlands: More than ten times as much gas lies under the North West of England than previously believed - and it could make the UK self-sufficient for at least 10 years. The red areas highlight where shale gas is thought to be present

Untapped: A test drilling site for shale gas on the outskirts of Southport, Lancashire, one of the areas of Britain which could hold enough to keep the UK self-sufficient for a decade

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Why are greens so keen to destroy the world’s wildlife?

This pursuit of the dream of “carbon-free energy” is creating an ecological catastrophe

Anti-fracking protesters celebrate a rejected fracking planning application during a demonstration outside Lancashire County Hall in Preston Photo: Andrew Yates/Reuters


By Christopher Booker
04 Jul 2015
The Telegraph

1170 Comments

Last week’s scenes of green campaigners exulting at the decision by 10 Lancashire county councillors to reject an application to erect a drilling rig for fracking near Preston – on the grounds that it would have an “adverse urbanising effect on the landscape” – recalled a piece I wrote in January, headed “Which 'environment’ do 'environmentalists’ really care about?”.

On that occasion, the greenies were celebrating the refusal of a previous fracking application, just when they were welcoming plans to add a further 24 wind turbines 400ft high to what is already England’s largest onshore wind farm, looking down from the Pennines on Rochdale.

When Professor David MacKay stepped down as chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) last year, he produced a report comparing the environmental impact of a fracking site to that of wind farms. Over 25 years, he calculated, a single “shale gas pad” covering five acres, with a drilling rig 85ft high (only needed for less than a year), would produce as much energy as 87 giant wind turbines, covering 5.6 square miles and visible up to 20 miles away. Yet, to the greenies, the first of these, capable of producing energy whenever needed, without a penny of subsidy, is anathema; while the second, producing electricity very unreliably in return for millions of pounds in subsidies, fills them with rapture.

Ever more evidence is piling in these days to show how one of the oddest anomalies of our time is the astonishing extent to which the dream of “renewable, carbon-free” energy is creating one environmental disaster after another. The flailing blades of wind turbines across the world may have been shown to kill millions of birds and bats; a fact that their enthusiasts, including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, do not advertise. But even more blatant is becoming the wholesale destruction of forests, thanks to the lavish subsidies now being offered to burn them as “biomass” to make electricity.

Orphaned orangutans huddle together for a 'family' portrait at the Orangutan Foundation International HQ in Borneo (Photo: Solent)

A chilling recent report by the journalist David Rose showed the ecological devastation being wrought over thousands of square miles of hardwood forest in the US to fuel power stations in Britain such as Drax, by a process that even some environmentalists now admit ends up by giving off more CO2 than the coal it is intended to replace. In another report, Rose used shocking pictures to show how the “biomass” craze, heavily subsidised through Decc’s Renewable Heat Initiative, is creating a similar swath of destruction across ancient woodlands here in Britain, even including some owned by the climate-dotty National Trust. As one academic ecologist mourns, forests full of wildlife “are being butchered in the name of an ideology”.

It has long been known that a scandal of the age is the even greater havoc being wrought in south-east Asia, where thousands of square miles of rainforest, brimming with life, are being replaced by sterile palm oil plantations to meet the EU’s targets for “biofuels”. Last month, the Telegraph published a report on how, inter alia, this is killing off the last orang-utans across a huge area of Sumatra.

Large areas of the Amazon have been flooded to power hydro-electric dams (Photo: Alamy)

Then, only last week, the University of East Anglia published a study on just one of the smallest of 40 massive hydro-electric schemes in Brazil. Twenty-five years after 1,000 square miles of the Amazon rainforest were flooded by the Balbina dam, to produce a mere 250 megawatts of electricity, less than 1 per cent of the 3,546 islands it created still have any significant wildlife left. Billions of animals, birds, reptiles and insects, not to mention the former forest‑dwelling Indian tribes, have vanished. Again, scientific studies show that the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from the rotting vegetation destroyed by this and other hydroelectric schemes, some very much larger than Balbina, is far greater than anything their “renewable” power nominally saves.

All in all, wherever we look, this pursuit of the dream of “carbon-free energy” is creating an ecological catastrophe. Like so many of the great crimes of history, this one is being perpetrated by people who imagine they are doing something praiseworthy. In this case, possessed by their delusion that they are battling for nature and the future of the planet, they are in fact doing as much as anyone to destroy the very things they kid themselves they are trying to save.

Why are greens so keen to destroy the world’s wildlife? - Telegraph

 

[grainfedpraiboy]

Fossils fuels are not only the most abundant, efficient, technologically advanced source of energy.. they are by far and away the cleanest.. especially when compared to the massively inefficient and environmentally destructive sources such as solar, wind or biofuels.

What a tremendous pile of malarkey.

Fossil fuels represent the only true source of abundant power for the forseeable future.. the onset of fusion power being a potential replacement.. but that will certainly not be until the latter part of this century... if then.

Agreed

With AGW being now a proven Fraud.. a political and philosophical con job.. there's nothing to worry about.

There is a process known as "critical thinking". At it's core is the concept of analytical reasoning. As such, if you consider the societal political debates around science you see a disproportionate number of people on the left who reject the overwhelming consensus of research and scientific claims that GMO foods are safe and believe it is in fact a conspiracy of the scientific community (in part so they don't lose their funding) to introduce foods harmful to the environment and people. Scientists involved in climate research however, are ethical, moral and follow the established principles and procedures for scientific research.

On the right it is the exact reverse. The immoral unethical con artists are the climate scientists while the upstanding and ethically unwavering food scientists are beyond reproach.

From the anti vaxxers who believe medical scientists are part of a conspiracy to the religious who believe paleontologists, astronomers and archeologists are part of a conspiracy there is always some segment of the population that believes their religious or political beliefs are under attack by junk science.

Should you ever apply the principles of critical thinking you will quickly discover the "philosophical con job" is the one you've waged against yourself.

The old warning that we will run out of fossil fuels.. the previous fear mongering of the radical environmentalists.. was disproven and discarded decades ago. You wonder what the nut jobs in the enviro cult will come up with nest.

Peak oil is a fact the same way there is such a thing as peak gravel pits and peak iron ore. When and if we ever arrive at it when it is important as a resource is unclear.

In fact the only thing we have to fear.. is fear itself.. continually whipped up by the pagan barbarians of depopulation and deindustrialization.

We're still cocking up our environment and thereby our future through excessive consumption, population growth and inefficient use of resources.

Wasn't that long ago guys like you were singing the same tune as above and fighting to keep the status quo. back then we had dead lakes from acid rain, most urban rivers in Canada were so polluted you couldn't raft on them let alone eat the fish or swim, PCBs and raw sewage were dumped in water bodies with little to no regulation and lead paint and in fuel was harming the development of the brains of children (which might explain some of your current views).

We need to shift our global behaviour to one that is more sustainable and promotes the interest and well being of our species and takes into consideration that we are now the caretakers of all other species. Fighting that is just plain stupid.

 

[spaminator]

The Conspiracy Show #1-4: Are We Running Out of Oil? - Vision TV Channel Canada