pie is in the sky
Why $5 Gas Is Good for America
(Matt) Simmons' techno-cluelessness would be funny - calling Jed Clampett with his 12-gauge! - if he weren't the spearhead of a whole hand-wringing school of petro-pessimism. The oil fields are running dry, the gas gauge is on empty, the American way of life is doomed - these ideas bob like plastic shark fins on the storm surge of current oil prices. But the history of energy innovation suggests something very different - and a lot less dire.
All of which would be seriously alarming but for one happy fact: We've never had more options for keeping those wheels turning. Aramco's fuzzy logic is just one of a multitude of new tools and fuels - some proven, some in the works, and some wildly speculative. The main thing standing between those possibilities and your gas tank is cheap crude oil that costs Aramco barely $3 a barrel to bring to the surface.
After a few missteps lately, I'd made a promise to myself not to rely on the cheap trick of ranting in the direction of morons, but this article from Wired News takes the cake, and wins a prize for the amount of empty rhetoric employed in lieu of verifiable facts.
And the ad-hominum attacks against Simmons remove any doubt. I am sharpening my scalpel. Surgery to follow.
More to come.
In the meantime, enjoy this collection of Energy Foolishness, including more from the author of the above Wired article, Spencer Reiss.
posted by JMS @ 2:32 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Couldn't help to once again think about the similarity between humans and sheep when I read that Spencer Reiss article. Perhaps this article might clarify why sheep, like humans, don't mind walking to the slaughterhouse because "there might in reality be something really good in there rather than someone killing us off", rather than breaking loose from the fold:
Creating 'human-sheep' for research
Here's some nice quotes:
On a farm about six miles outside this gambling town, Jason Chamberlain looks over a flock of about 50 smelly sheep, many of them possessing partially human livers, hearts, brains and other organs.
And here's the best part:
Particularly worrisome to some scientists are the nightmare scenarios that could arise from the mixing of brain cells: What if a human mind somehow got trapped
inside a sheep's head?
Silly me who thought we were there already…
Keep up the good work!
/Niklas (Sweden)
You beat me to it on this one - I was just about to write a post castigating this moron - he managed to sum up every idiot misconception of peak oil into one article...
This Wired article should have been written up in that other tech magazine with a more fitting title "Red Herring".
I started this blog in part with the intention of finding out if there are valid "big energy" alternatives to oil.
Methane Hydrates is really the only one that pencils out in my little black book, ignoring the bit of trivia where burning it plays out a gigantic snuff film on the blue planet.
It infuriates me to see such buttheaded propositions presented with a straight face.
We need clean abundant energy, such as a monkey in a pristine rainforest enjoys.
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