Interesting Energy article by an International Business Executive ...

by Donna Quixote on November 23, 2012

M Marwood ? September 2012

Get Smart about your Energy Future

I?m going to try to have an honest conversation about our energy future, climate change and what it means for you as a member of the generation that will have to live with the consequences of today?s energy policy choices. My goal is to present an argument based on easily verifiable facts and to appeal to your common sense.

On October 31, 2011, the world?s population reached 7 billion. By the middle of this century the population could be close to 10 billion. Consider also that about 1/3^rd?of those folks have never flipped on a light switch. There should be no doubt that we must all be concerned about how the world will meet its energy needs in the future. There may be no greater challenge facing mankind.

A Review of History

The youths of today are being told that by the time they are my age the world will no longer be powered by fossil fuels. That?s the same story they were telling me in 1973 when Saudi Arabia suddenly got miffed about the Yom Kipper War and created a crisis by suddenly shutting off our oil supply. In those years, the ?scientific consensus? was that the world was running out of oil, the earth was cooling, fossil fuels were to blame and we were all going to freeze to death unless we kicked our addiction to fossil fuels.

We were told that we needed to find alternatives to fossil fuels, and fast! President Jimmy Carter declared that we would be out of oil by 1990 and said that developing alternative energy was the ?moral equivalent of war.? The challenge was considered too important to leave to market forces so the government intervened with massive tax-payer subsidies in an attempt to find alternatives to oil. That thinking led to the 1977 National Energy Plan in the United States, an attempt at central planning that failed miserably. We are still heavily dependent on foreign oil.

Fast forward to today, and we see the situation has not changed much, except that now the ?scientific consensus? is that the earth is getting hotter rather than colder and that humans are to blame. Once again we are told the world is running out of oil and we are all doomed unless we find alternatives to oil, gas and coal ? fast! And guess what ? we are also being told again that the job is too important to be left to the free-market entrepreneurs, that government must intervene and subsidize the alternative energy initiatives with huge tax-payer subsidies.

The doomsayers in the 1970?s were remarkably wrong then, and I will wager that the doomsayers of today will be wrong too. In the last 35 years the world has consumed more oil than three times the known oil reserves when Jimmy Carter made his declaration. And the known oil reserves today are more than double what they were then.

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Source: http://quixoteslaststand.com/2012/11/23/interesting-energy-article-by-an-international-business-executive-more-common-sense/

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