Overview Of An Energy Plan From T. Boone Pickens

T. Boone Pickens, now the 80 year old CEO of BP Capital, made billions as an oil man. He is well respected and a solid conservative. When he says that this energy crisis is different and we can't just drill our way out of this one, its time to listen and take notes.
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Mr. Pickens has recently begun a campaign to push a series of initiatives to attack our energy crisis. He has a series of ads on television and has recently written an article in the WSJ going into more detail. While he favors more drilling, he does not see that alone as what will meet our future energy needs:

. . . [O]ur country faces what I believe is the most serious situation since World War II.

The problem, of course, is our growing dependence on foreign oil – it's extreme, it's dangerous, and it threatens the future of our nation.

Let me share a few facts: Each year we import more and more oil. In 1973, the year of the infamous oil embargo, the United States imported about 24% of our oil. In 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War, this had climbed to 42%. Today, we import almost 70% of our oil.

. . . This year, we will spend almost $700 billion on imported oil, which is more than four times the annual cost of our current war in Iraq.

In fact, if we don't do anything about this problem, over the next 10 years we will spend around $10 trillion importing foreign oil. That is $10 trillion leaving the U.S. and going to foreign nations, making it what I certainly believe will be the single largest transfer of wealth in human history.

Why do I believe that our dependence on foreign oil is such a danger to our country? Put simply, our economic engine is now 70% dependent on the energy resources of other countries, their good judgment, and most importantly, their good will toward us. Foreign oil is at the intersection of America's three most important issues: the economy, the environment and our national security. We need an energy plan that maps out how we're going to work our way out of this mess. I think I have such a plan.

Consider this: The world produces about 85 million barrels of oil a day, but global demand now tops 86 million barrels a day. And despite three years of record price increases, world oil production has declined every year since 2005. Meanwhile, the demand for oil will only increase as growing economies in countries like India and China gear up for enhanced oil consumption.

. . . I have a clear goal in mind with my plan. I want to reduce America's foreign oil imports by more than one-third in the next five to 10 years.

How will we do it? We'll start with wind power. Wind is 100% domestic, it is 100% renewable and it is 100% clean. Did you know that the midsection of this country, that stretch of land that starts in West Texas and reaches all the way up to the border with Canada, is called the "Saudi Arabia of the Wind"? It gets that name because we have the greatest wind reserves in the world. In 2008, the Department of Energy issued a study that stated that the U.S. has the capacity to generate 20% of its electricity supply from wind by 2030. I think we can do this or even more, but we must do it quicker.

My plan calls for taking the energy generated by wind and using it to replace a significant percentage of the natural gas that is now being used to fuel our power plants. Today, natural gas accounts for about 22% of our electricity generation in the U.S. We can use new wind capacity to free up the natural gas for use as a transportation fuel. That would displace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. Natural gas is the only domestic energy of size that can be used to replace oil used for transportation, and it is abundant in the U.S. It is cheap and it is clean. With eight million natural-gas-powered vehicles on the road world-wide, the technology already exists to rapidly build out fleets of trucks, buses and even cars using natural gas as a fuel. Of these eight million vehicles, the U.S. has a paltry 150,000 right now. We can and should do so much more to build our fleet of natural-gas-powered vehicles.

I believe this plan will be the perfect bridge to the future, affording us the time to develop new technologies and a new perspective on our energy use. In addition to the plan I have proposed, I also want to see us explore all avenues and every energy alternative, from more R&D into batteries and fuel cells to development of solar, ethanol and biomass to more conservation. Drilling in the outer continental shelf should be considered as well, as we need to look at all options, recognizing that there is no silver bullet.

I believe my plan can be accomplished within 10 years if this country takes decisive and bold steps immediately. This plan dramatically reduces our dependence on foreign oil and lowers the cost of transportation. It invests in the heartland, creating thousands of new jobs. It substantially reduces America's carbon footprint and uses existing, proven technology. It will be accomplished solely through private investment with no new consumer or corporate taxes or government regulation. It will build a bridge to the future, giving us the time to develop new technologies.

The future begins as soon as Congress and the president act. The government must mandate the formation of wind and solar transmission corridors, and renew the subsidies for economic and alternative energy development in areas where the wind and sun are abundant. I am also calling for a monthly progress report on the reduction in foreign oil imports, as well as a monthly progress report on the state of development of natural gas vehicles in this country.

We have a golden opportunity in this election year to form bipartisan support for this plan. We have the grit and fortitude to shoulder the responsibility of change when our country's future is at stake, as Americans have proven repeatedly throughout this nation's history.

Read the entire article. I do not know enough about the inner workings of energy grids to be able to speak on the viability of Mr. Pickens's plan for generating 20% of our energy needs via wind power. Where significant wind power generation has been tried, there have been problems. (I hear some indicate that feeding this wind energy into power plants would require substantial construction of power lines that have proven unpopular. As an aside to the Supreme Court, this is precisely the type of scenario in which the Fifth Amendment is meant to play a role.) I also did not see any mention of nuclear power, which we know from France can be used to provide clean, cheap and dependable energy. Beyond that . . . more and faster, please.

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Interesting News - Super Tuesday Edition

This is it. Super Tuesday is here.
Big Lizards Guide to Uber Tuesday for the Perplexed is a where to go for your scorecard. And pundits are using their columns to try and influence the vote. E.J. Dionne has found his personal savior in Obama. Can we have a "hallelujah" Indeed, we now know the debate is over and the only ones who consider it otherwise are racists. Could they be as racist as the head of Trinity United, however? On the right side, Andres Martinez leads with the question of whether McCain has accepted Jesus as his personal savior, while Rick Moran ponders the redefining of what it means to be a Republican. I happen to share the view of the Glittering Eye on McCain.

John Bolton ponder how our spy chief, Mitch McConnell, can undue the tremendous damage of the NIE on Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program when he testifies before Congress this week.

David Aaronovitch ponders the horrendous ramifications of a withdrawal from Afghanistan. As does a professor in Pakistan. America will not abandon it, but NATO is shaky indeed, compliments of the cowardly and disloyal Germans who have refused to provide combat soldiers that would actually fight in the NATO operation.

As I have blogged previously, Gordon Brown plans to get upwards of 30% of the UK’s energy through a massive construction of wind turbines throughout Britain. It was nuts to begin with, and now its worse. "Nato has begun an investigation into British findings that wind farms make overflying planes invisible to radar . . ." Meanwhile, Labour has given £1 billion in tax receipts to energy companies to start building them – which the companies have pocketed while energy prices in the UK skyrocket.

More insane PC silencing of free speech in Britain. "Schools are being ordered to drop the term "mum and dad" in case it offends pupils from a single-parent, homosexual or turkey-baster ‘family.’" And if its not the PC crowd, it’s the bureaucrats doing in the quality of life.

"A new study says that mandatory diversity training backfires: After looking at data from 830 workplaces, researchers discovered that sensitivity seminars and their ilk led to declines in the number of women and minorities in management."

What will you do to celebrate Waitangi Day tomorrow, take a Mori tribesman to dinner?

Sleaze goes Goracle green. He is the modern version of a war profiteer.

More on the travesty of justice in the Maldives following the gang rape of a 12 year old girl by members of the religion of peace.

Gloria Steinem editorializes at TNOY as to the many accomplishments of the "womyn’s" movement in America. You will find a few of the accomplishments surprising, beginning with the more equal distribution of STD’s

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EU's Energy Plans & Economic Insanity

I posted below on how Britian's EU membership portends to be an economic disaster. The EU is responsible for the UK's out of control immigration and the costs associated therewith - including rising taxes, crime and the burden on the infrastructure. The EU is in large measure responsible for huge jump food costs with their emphasis on bio-fuels which is taking arable land out of production. Then there are the regulatory costs, the transfer of wealth to the EU, and lastly, the production and cost of energy. Today, Chistopher Booker at the Telegraph and Richard North at EU Referendum both look at the looming catastrophe of the EU driven energy policy and costs for Britain.

It was appropriate that, just as our MPs were voting last week to hand over yet more of the power to run this country in the EU treaty, the EU itself should be unveiling easily the most ambitious example yet of how it uses the powers we have already given away. The proposals for "fighting climate change" announced on Wednesday by an array of EU commissioners make Stalin's Five-Year Plans look like a model of practical politics.

Few might guess, from the two-dimensional reporting of these plans in the media, just what a gamble with Europe's future we are undertaking - spending trillions of pounds for a highly dubious return, at a devastating cost to all our economies.

The targets Britain will be legally committed to reach within 12 years fall under three main headings. Firstly, that 15 per cent of our energy should come from renewable sources such as wind (currently 1 per cent). Secondly, that 10 per cent of our transport fuel should be biofuels. Thirdly, that we accept a more draconian version of the "emissions trading scheme" that is already adding up to 12 per cent to our electricity bills.

The most prominent proposal is that which will require Britain to build up to 20,000 more wind turbines, including the 7,000 offshore giants announced by the Government before Christmas. . . .

At £2 million per megawatt of "capacity" (according to the Carbon Trust), the bill for the Government's 33 gigawatts (Gw) would be £66 billion (and even that, as was admitted in a recent parliamentary answer, doesn't include an extra £10 billion needed to connect the turbines to the grid). But the actual output of these turbines, because of the wind's unreliability, would be barely a third of their capacity. The resulting 11Gw could be produced by just seven new "carbon-free" nuclear power stations, at a quarter of the cost.

The EU's plans for "renewables" do not include nuclear energy. Worse, they take no account of the back-up needed for when the wind is not blowing - which would require Britain to have 33Gw of capacity constantly available from conventional power stations.

. . . This is crazy enough, but the EU's policy on biofuels is even more so. The costs - up to £50 billion by 2020 - would, as the EU's own scientific experts have just advised, "outweigh the benefits". To grow the crops needed to meet the target would require all the farmland the EU currently uses to grow food, at a time when world food prices are soaring. Even Friends of the Earth have called on the EU to abandon its obsession with biofuels. Yet the Commission presses on regardless.

As for the "emissions trading scheme" (a system originating with the Kyoto Protocol, whereby businesses can buy or sell "carbon credits", supposedly to allow market forces to ensure that targets are met), the Commission last week predicted that by 2020 this could be raising £38 billion a year from electricity users. Of this, £6.5 billion a year would be paid by the UK, equating to £260 for every household in the country.

The Commission itself predicts, in recently leaked documents, that this will have major consequences for the EU's economy, and that heavy industries, such as steel, aluminium, chemicals and cement, will have to raise their prices substantially, some by as much as 48 per cent. Yet when it was pointed out that this will put EU industries at a competitive disadvantage, the Commission's only response was to suggest tariffs on imports from countries such as China or America that are not signed up to Kyoto.

It looks like the most expensive economic suicide note in history. But just as alarming is how little this madness has been exposed to informed analysis. It seems, finally, that the price we pay for membership of the EU and the price of our obsession with global warming are about to become very painfully synonymous. And no one seems to have noticed.

Read the entire article. And do see the EU Referendum's take on all of this. Dr. North's post is notable for his exploration of the subsidies associated with wind farms.

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Slouching Towards Brussels & Economic Oppression

And what rough beast,
its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Brussels
to be born?''

My apologies to Yeats, from whom I request some indulgence for the minor rewording of the final stanza of his poem, The Second Coming.

The rough beast to which I refer is the European Union, now about to emerge from the treaty of Lisbon as a super-state and the central government for all its subordinate members. And from the vantage point of the average middle class person in Britain, the EU can only be seen as a rough beast indeed. The economic costs of this beast are only beginning to be felt. They portend to get much worse.

The average per capita GDP in the UK is estimated at £23,500 and is rising at about 2.9% annually. Enter the EU.

Food Costs –

The most basic expense for all people is food. And here, the EU is doing no one any favors. Their insane insistence on biofuel production is taking arable land and world wide agriculture out of the food business and into the energy business. Supplies of food are decreasing while demand is rising world wide. The outcome does not require a degree in economics to figure out. According to a recent Telegraph article, "food prices are accelerating at their fastest rate since records began, fuelling a rise in the average family's shopping bill of £750 a year." And to add insult to injury, we now know that biofuels are far less environmentally friendly than fossil fuels. The global warming enthusiasts at the EU who have politicized the science of climate change for their own ends still have not yet come to grips with that last bit.

Energy Costs –

Get ready for energy costs to make a real rise in the coming decade, compliments of the EU. The estimate right now from Open Europe is that households will have to pay up to £730 a year to fund plans to tackle climate change." That is assuming all goes as planned. The fact is that the numbers might only rise more as the brilliant plans hatched to meet EU targets for renewable energy appear to be boondoggles waiting to happen.

The cleanest source of renewable energy is atomic power which, right now, provides almost 20% of Britain’s energy needs. But aging plants will almost all be decommissioned before 2023, and while plans exist to build some replacement plants, the projection today is that atomic energy will be providing only 7% of Britain’s energy by 2020.

What is planned instead are a series of two very ambitious – and highly questionable – projects to meet the EU targets. The first is Severn Barrage Tidal project which is hoped to provide 5% Britain’s energy needs when built prior to 2020.

The cost of the 10 mile barrage is estimated at a minimum of 15 billion and would be the largest world wide. . . [T]he barrage could . . . provide up to 5% of UK electricity . . . The Renewable Energy Centre released a cautionary statement highlighting its concern that the Government, in its urgency to meet its carbon targets has "plumped for a project which will cost billions of pounds, take over ten years to construct and which may prove in the long term, not to be a cost effective or sustainable solution."

. . . The Barrage relies on the ebb tide and so produces energy only at these times in the tide cycle. Bearing in mind the fundamental principle that electricity can not be stored, this in effect creates supply spikes to the National Grid. In order to keep the power supply constant, the barrage will need to be supported by several gas fired power stations which in turn will produce carbon emissions. This will not only affect the cost effectiveness of the barrage but contradict the aim of finding other energy alternatives to fossil fuels.

Read the entire article. Other problems involve the impact on wildlife and sustainability of the barrage in light of silt build-up.

But then there is the real boondoggle - the insane plan hatched by Labour to turn Britain and its coastline into a giant wind turbine farm. Current plans are to generate 30% of Britain’s energy by wind turbines by the Year 2020.

The problem is that wind turbines are far from effective – and indeed, indications are that relying on wind power for anything over 10% of electricity needs destabilizes the power grid. That said, the one place that wind turbines have been tried in serious numbers – Denmark, which built enough wind turbines to generate 19% of their power needs- there have been all sorts of problems associated with them to the point where all further wind turbine construction has been halted. There is a good essay of the massive negatives associated with wind turbines here, and an excellent essay by Christopher Booker in the Telegraph not long ago. The bottom line is, between the insanity of the Labour government and the hubris of the EU, the middle class Brit is going to be taking it in the shorts on energy costs in the coming decade.

Immigration related costs -

The first thing to understand about immigration is that, for all practical purposes, it is the EU and not Britain which controls Britain’s borders. EU Treaties dating back to the 1957 Treaty of Rome require that Britain open its borders to all people from EU countries. Further, EU law plays the majority role in requiring Britain to allow in people from outside the EU – and than prevents Britain from getting rid of the worst of them.

And immigration into Britain is now at record levels, exceeding half a million foreign nationals each year – with corresponding record levels of British nationals emigrating. Beyond that, "a migrant baby boom is fuelling the fastest growth in the UK's population since the 1960s - with one in every five children now born to foreign mothers." The rate of immigration into the UK and the immigrant baby boom pose to add 50 per cent to today's population" in four decades. Indeed, the number of immigrants is so significant as to threaten the Central Banks controls on inflation. With that in mind, do recall that in 2004, the Home Office was telling Britain that immigration from the new EU states "would be no more than 13,000 a year."

One ramification of this is that now, "in a total of 1,338 primary and secondary schools - more than one in 20 of all schools in England - children with English as their first language are in the minority." This is putting a severe strain on school funding. And not surprisingly, it is putting a severe strain on all aspects of Britain’s infrastructure. Another aspect is the loss of jobs for Brits in their own country. "More than half a million British-born employees have vanished from the UK workforce since the influx of Eastern European immigrants." Gordon Brown made a pledge in September to "create British jobs for British workers" – but has since had to quietly bury the plan because it would be an illegal practice under EU law. One would think the Prime Minister might know how EU law effects his country and his ability to govern – particularly before signing away Britain’s sovereignty to the EU.

The increase in immigration is also driving a corresponding above inflation increase in local council taxes to meet the increasing demands on local infrastructure. The average local council tax is now up to £1,145. The average rise in council taxes is 4%. As an aside, the problems here are being compounded as Labour is redistributing council tax revenues from the strapped south to Labour electoral strongholds in the north.

And lastly, there has been an explosion – in some areas by more than nine-fold - in crime associated with the vast increase in immigrants, particularly those from Romania. They are lured by Britain’s "generous benefits system" and do appear to be making the most of it.

Dane geld to the EU -

Parliament which just approved a massive transfer of wealth to the EU after only a bit more than 3 hours of debate. As the EU Referendum calculates, that works out to a transfer of British tax dollars at a rate of "£481 million a minute." As it stands now, the UK’s "net contributions to the EU will increase from an already horrendously large £4.7 billion" to £10 to £11 billion in 2011. A warning to the UK citizenry – gird your loins and keep your hands on your wallets. The tax man cometh.

EU Regulation of the Economy -

The EU is still in its nascent stages – with its full powers far from reaching their zenith. Yet even now it is apparent that the EU is making "a tireless effort to regulate everything." And of course, all new regulations inevitably impose some financial cost to implement and enforce – and in the EU’s case, to decipher. In addition, many regulations impose additional burdens by raising the price of existing goods and services or making less costly options unavailable. For example, see here, here, here and here.

Then there is the other not quite salutary effects of regulation – making it difficult for new businesses to enter into and compete in highly regulated markets. It would seem the EU excels at that.

Update: See this humorous application of EU regulation. It falls into the category of "you just can't make this stuff up."

Summary:

So how much, in toto, is all of this going to cost the average Brit, today and a decade from now? If I had a supercomputer and a year to analyze direct and indirect costs, perhaps I might be able to find an answer. In any event, it is fair to say that the costs are already significant and will only rise based on all of the above. Given all the above, the cost of the EU for the average Brit portends to become oppressive over the next decade. The EU is seen by those on its gravy train as a socialist utopia. I doubt that vision will be shared by anyone not on that train, even today. Which is why Europe is in the midst of a coup, with the EU slouching towards Brussels to be born while the people of the UK and Europe are denied any say in its birth.

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A Methane Gas Emission in Church . . .

If global warming is the new religion of world socialism - and even the Pope seems to think so - than the IPCC's Bali Conference, now ended, was its High Mass. And from the way some of the particpants have reacted, one might think that . . . well, a noxious fume had been let loose amongst the otherwise pristine sea air circulating in the Global Warming Cathedral. Much to the chagrin of the true believers present in Bali, the US apparently could not be cajoled into putting a stake in capitalism by agreeing to a massive redistribution of its national wealth via a carbon tithe. That in fact was a major motivation of many of the faithful who were present for the services, as reported by one attendee:

A common theme [at the Bali Conference] was that the "solutions" to climate change that are being posed by many governments, such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and biofuels are false and are not rooted in justice. Another point was that as this current economic system got us here in the first place, a climate change response must . . . [provide for] a redistribution of wealth and resources.

See here. And the U.S. didn't even agree to come on board for an economy busting massive decrease in its carbon footprint, though it did agree to talk more about it.

All of this was apparently too much for the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, the man negotiating on behalf of the UN at Bali. Fashionably dressed in eco-friendly church attire - a floral shirt - Mr. de Boer had to be led away when he broke down in tears over the failure to reach an agreement for a hard target reduction in carbon emissions. The "Crying Dutchman's" emotional outburst was emblematic of the angst that many of the parishioners seemed to be feeling when they characterized the end result of Bali as "fatally flawed." It should go without saying that such characterization is all a matter of one's perspective.

But not all in Bali were held back by ecognosticism. Britain's Labour government certainly was not.

The socialists in Britain's Labour government are true believers. Indeed, Labour is trying to indoctrinate Britain's young in this new religion, making the Goracle's "An Inconvenient Truth" part of the national school curriculum for children aged 11 to 13. And Prime Minister Gordon Fawkes Brown considers himself a standard bearer of the faith, vowing to "lead Europe on climate change." Shortly before the Bali service convened, he committed Britain to a massive 60% reduction of carbon emissions by 2050. Its not hard to forecast what that will do to Britain's economy if it ever comes to fruition.

Of course, the reality is that Britain's economy no longer belongs to Brown, he having unilaterally signed over the sovereignty of Britain to the EU the other day. But, that aside, is hardly the end of PM Gordon Fawkes Brown's madness. Christopher Booker comments in the Telegraph upon Gordon's latest folly in Bali, or, as Booker characterizes it, "the maddest single decision ever made by British ministers." Booker is referring to Gordon's decision, announced through his Secretary Timothy Hutton "amid the clouds of self-righteous humbug billowing out from Bali," to build "7,000 giant offshore wind turbines round Britain's coast by 2020, to meet our EU target on renewable energy." Booker examines this "megalomaniac project" that defies reality:

For a start, no one mentioned costs. Mr Hutton spoke of his turbines, equivalent to one every half mile of coastline, as having a capacity of 33 gigawatts (GW), a hefty chunk of the 75GW of power we need at peak demand. But with the cost of giant offshore turbines, as tall as 850 feet, estimated at £1.6 billion per GW of capacity, this represents a bill of more than £50 billion - equivalent to the colossal sum earmarked last week by central banks to shore up the world banking system.

But of course the point about offshore turbines is that, because wind blows intermittently, they only generate on average at a third or less of capacity. So Mr Hutton's 33GW figure comes down to 11GW. To generate this much power from "carbon-free" nuclear energy would require six or seven nuclear power stations and cost, at something under £20 billion, less than half as much as the turbines.

This, however, is only the start of the madness. Because those turbines would generate on average only a third of the time, back-up would be needed to provide power for the remaining two thirds - say, another 12 nuclear power stations costing an additional £30 billion, putting the real cost of Mr Hutton's fantasy at nearer £80 billion - more than doubling our electricity bills.

. . . The turbines' siting would mean that much of the national grid would have to be restructured, costing further billions. And because wind power is so unpredictable and needs other sources available at a moment's notice, it is generally accepted that any contribution above 10 per cent made by wind to a grid dangerously destabilises it.

Two years ago, much of western Europe blacked out after a rush of German windpower into the continental grid forced other power stations to close down. The head of Austria's grid warned that the system was becoming so unbalanced by the "excessive" building of wind turbines that Europe would soon be "confronted with massive connector problems". Yet Mr Hutton's turbines would require a system capable of withstanding power swings of up to 33GW, when the only outside backup on which our island grid can depend is a 2GW connector to France (which derives 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power). . .

Amen. If only Ted Kennedy had a summer home overlooking the North Sea, Booker and his small number of like minded heretical Brits might able to generate some staunch opposition to such a project.

The bottom line of all this is that socialists are largely ascendent throughout the world today, they are using global warming as a tool to advance their political philosophy, and we may well get dragged into this if we are not careful. While we desperately need to get off oil, and we do need to husband the environment, those things have precious little in common with goals and methods of the religion of global warming. Newt Gingrich's A Contract With The Earth is well worth a read in this regard.

Addendum: Reading the Treaty of Lisbon the other day was quite educational. The Treaty of Lisbon is the one just signed that marks the EU's debut as a true state and establishes a Constitution for the EU. The fine folks at the EU have taken the dubious scientific proposition of global warming, turned it into dogma, and made it a matter of Constitutional law.

By Article 4 of the new Lisbon Treaty/Constitution, the EU takes primacy to pass laws on the "environment." The Treaty/Constitution amends Article 179 to explicitly recognize the problem of "climate change" as an "environmental" problem and provides the EU with a constitutional mandate to take appropriate measures to "deal with" it. It is a constitutional excuse for centralizing power and redistributing wealth on a scale unheard of. And as Constitutional law, that means that judicially, "climate change" is a settled issue. No amount of scientific argument will even be heard as a means to challenge any law the EU chooses to pass in which they claim global warming as a justification. The ramifications of that are just jaw dropping. If global warming is a socialist's wet dream, than the people that staff the EU are going to bed warm and comfy each night in globally warmed pup tents.

Update: Is it possible for true believers to corner the market on hypocrisy? (H/T Instapundit)

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