SPECTRUM/Penny Nixon
The loony left has declared that the Earth is flat, energy can be created from nothing, gravity does not exist, and money grows on trees. Mr. Rose, writing about “alternative energy” in the April 26 edition of the Anchorage newspaper, asserts that Alaska will sell its “last drop of oil by midcentury,” then claims that Alaska has the “wind, geothermal and biomass resource potential to challenge Iowa in renewable energy production,” and that � villages are laboratories to use as remote wind generating systems.” He then
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Environmentalists have made dire predictions of doom since the mid '70s. As Paul Ehrlich, the twice discredited environmental prophet of doom, put it: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
OPEC founder Sheik Yamani warned OPEC ministers that “the Stone Age ended, but not for lack of stones; and the Oil Age will end, but not for lack of oil.” In the 1920s, the known supply of oil was 10 years. Today it's 40 years, despite trillions of barrels used in the interim.
In all of human history, men have created new tools to use as the need arose. Oil will follow this pattern, because the laws of economics and physics are the same today as they were 10,000 years ago.
Alaska will sell its last drop of oil when men no longer need it at a given price, and not until then. This might be in two weeks, or two centuries.
Oil shale, sands, heavy oil, coal liquefaction and gas to liquids were mere dreams 50 years ago. Today, technology is here to use these sources of energy efficiently and more cheaply. If all the known U.S. supplies of energy were tapped, we have enough energy to last some 15,000 years at current usage levels. The material is uranium, the technology is breeder reactors. It merely takes demand to trigger the use.
I have actually designed, built and operated a windmill, and I can tell you that the cost of wind energy is 4-6 times that of conventional. Western Alaska is littered with the skeletons of discarded windmills destroyed by icing and gale-force winds.
Worse, wind power is at its lowest just as demand peaks every day. Denmark, after 25 years building thousands of acres of windmills, has not decommissioned a single conventional plant, because peak demand must be available at the instant it is needed, not when the wind is blowing.
Geothermal energy, to be effective, must be cheaper than conventional and within transmission distance of markets. In most of Alaska, it is not.
Biomass is a high-sounding way to create energy from nothing. In the real world, however, energy only can be transformed from one form (say chemical) to another, (say heat).
Plants store energy from the sun in the form of chemicals. These sugars take energy to extract and convert to alcohols. In the end, one gallon of ethanol costs more than gasoline, and your car needs 40 percent (US DoE) more fuel to go the same distance because ethanol has less energy than gasoline.
Then, methods for converting plants to sugar use sulfuric acid. Didn't Mr. Rose recently pitch a fit about a chlorine plant? By comparison, a shallow gas well produces as much energy as 220 acres of wood. Does Mr. Rose propose to cut down millions of acres of Alaska wood every year and use sulfuric acid on it?
Finally, the � villages” he volunteers for laboratories have chosen how they want their energy delivered. While it's worth noting that this energy is mostly subsidized, many of them sit atop readily available natural gas and oil reserves. Before wasting more public money on already discredited wind-energy subsidies, how about a gas well for them?
In the end, the laws of economics, physics and inventions of men will change the form of energy we will use, not the wishful anti-American dreams of utopians discredited by 70 years of socialist failures, passionate wailing notwithstanding. Mr. Rose knows full well the wind can't power his house reliably, which is why he hasn't spent the $30,000 it would take to make it happen.
C'mon folks, enough of the claptrap. The only known location where money grows on trees is on the Planet Uranus.
Penny Nixon lives in Wasilla.
Comments
12 comment(s)nexQuimimip wrote on Feb 14, 2009 3:07 PM:
Donna wrote on Feb 6, 2009 7:14 AM:
I would like to contact him if anyone can get him my e-mail address it would be greatly appreciated.
Donna J. Hoover (formerly Donna J. Groleau) "
Halcrow wrote on Nov 8, 2008 2:27 PM:
Alas, even if it should make its way over to corporate Diebold, it'll be dismissed as the irrelevent raving of an unrecognized voter (unrecognized, courtesy of Diebold). Only in America. "
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Nancy France wrote on Dec 14, 2007 11:39 AM: