The Santa Barbara oil spill highlights the problems that come with our addiction to black gold; seabirds and beaches turned the color and smell of a politician’s rotting heart.
Indeed the timing of the spill could not have been more appropriate; Obama had just approved oil exploration in the Arctic.
We are addicts, and all of our efforts thus far have only gotten us from 100% to 92% addiction levels. Environmentalists believe that we have to transition away from petroleum for our transportation needs; a quarter of our greenhouse emissions come from transport-related petroleum usage.
Which is why the advent of electric vehicle companies like Tesla is so exciting.
With all the fuss over climate change, we tend to forget that petroleum was once the savior of our environment; without it, we would have had to depend on even dirtier fuels like coal; and coal itself has saved countless trees from being turned to firewood.
Indeed, fossil fuels are not all made equal, and recent trends away from the internal combustion engine and towards electric vehicles might be the next step of the process.
Our electric energy is centrally generated at power plants, and can be produced by burning a variety of fossil fuels, via nuclear power or with green energy technologies like solar, hydro or wind; unlike singular internal combustion engines which do not have economies of scale, centrally produced electricity allows for a variety of alternative means of generation besides fossil fuels.
A centralized source of energy is also able to generate power much more efficiently than a car’s internal combustion engine which maxes out at 35-40% for an advanced combustion engine , though typical engines are only 26% efficient for gasoline. A combined-cycle gas-fired plant is able to go up to 56-60% efficiency.
More important than the efficiency and green alternatives afforded to us today… the greater the usage of central electricity, the market for which has largely been flat, the greater the impetus for the development of more efficient alternatives.
We have seen this in developing countries like India and China, which are starting to move away from “archaic” and extremely polluting coal power plants; in fact, China, despite recently displacing the US as the largest carbon emitter in the world, has also become the second largest producer of solar energy in the world (losing to Germany, which took top spot).
Then there’s the unintended consequences of moving away from oil: guess what happens to Saudi Arabia, currently responsible for massive human rights violations and thousands of civilian deaths in Yemen, yet which nobody has dared to so much as criticize.
The honest truth is that electric vehicles are unlikely to completely replace existing automobiles in America; they are (for now anyway) much cheaper to produce… and far more practical if you intend to travel to areas without an electricity outlet. However, electric vehicles don’t need to be a complete replacement; they could still be the kick-start that the green energy revolution needs, and we could cut down on the economy’s single biggest petroleum guzzler.
Sources: The Fifth Column
This Article (What Happens If We End Our Petroleum Addiction) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.
As long as the oil cartels run the world, it is going to be more of the same. More efficient solar panels and batteries could solve the problem. So could using Tesla’s “free energy,” which is a different form of solar energy. Sad that the company naming itself after Tesla won’t use his most beneficial “invention.”
Also, when you consider the impact of a hydrogen bomb, does anyone really believe that there is no efficient way to put water in an engine, separate hydrogen from oxygen, run the car on the hydrogen and send the oxygen out through the exhaust pipe?
There are plenty of ways to reduce or eliminate dependence on oil, but the Big Boys are never going to let it happen.
if there are so many ways then why dont you do it though?
Anonymous, It’s so hard to take you seriously anymore. You’ve perpetuated too many hoaxes, and half of the time you sound like my crazy uncle.
Yup. That’s how they do now, unfortunately.
Yes, you could say that the “big boys” will never let it happen. But what are you doing to make your bit of difference?
Also, you have to remember that it is not the oil cartel, but the western banking cartel that are the “big boys”/”cowardly fat cats” that call the shots, so to speak.
There are plenty of ways we can all reduce our dependency on oil and there are many little things you can do… change our shopping ways… everything from toothpaste to toys to the carry bags we use to carry our shopping… the plastic and oil based products are everywhere and we have just grown used to them.
Try a “plasticless month”.
My views for humanity are such..probably the only way anything will get fixed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkYliL7KIQs
Parasites will take to long we need a nice big asteroid or comet go out like trex and the Earth will fix itself in a few million years