Let’s go after the real threat

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, July 20, 2007

It has surprised me, a little bit, that there hasn’t been more attention paid to the National Petroleum Council’s report earlier this week that crude oil supplies can’t keep up with worldwide demand.

Given that we live in a nation – and, soon, a world – that is dependent in every way on plentiful and cheap petroleum products, one would think it would provoke at least a small shiver of concern when leaders of the nation’s top oil companies, utilities and energy think-tanks say we are facing an energy problem.

These are, after all, our biggest experts. They are also people who, in many cases, have a vested interest in selling as much oil as possible.

It may simply be that energy news, no matter how important, can’t compete for news time and space with the upcoming release of the new Harry Potter book or the tally of Sopranos Emmy nominations.

There may also be a national head-in-the-sand thing going on. It’s a lot easier to talk about the latest celebrity gossip than the hard truth that we are before long going to have to change the way we live, because the world’s thirst for fossil fuels is increasing daily, especially in places like China and India – countries so populous that they might put American energy consumption in the shade before too long.

There is room to increase crude oil production, but it won’t be enough to meet demand, the Petroleum Council report said. Furthermore, expanding production won’t be easy. It will call for ever-more-complicated and difficult methods to extract remaining reserves of oil.

Some of the Council’s report was good news for ethanol producers, as it recognized that development of alternative fuels can help bridge some of the gap.

More surprisingly, the Council’s report put conservation atop its list of recommendations, calling for cars with better fuel economy, increasingly efficient homes and appliances, and more efficient industrial use of power. I write “surprisingly” because this is a group that one would expect to be pretty much aligned with the administration’s position on energy, which has been to mostly ignore the benefits of conservation.

The Council also warned – and here there is no surprise – that attempts to reduce carbon emissions as a curb on global warming will make the energy situation all the more difficult. Some of the solutions to a looming oil shortage include liquefied coal and other fossil fuels that are not likely to burn any cleaner than gasoline.

There seems little doubt these days that there is a need to limit greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. But there is also a need to avoid putting those limits in place too fast, because there just aren’t enough good alternatives. Sure, we could stop many carbon emissions today; but at a cost of losing the electricity and gasoline that make our world go.

It’s a more sensitive issue than many people realize, because petroleum products don’t burn just to fuel personal vehicles and power plants. America’s bountiful agricultural industry is built on fossil fuel – from fertilizer to tractor engines and beyond, it all depends on petroleum products.

Really, the Council’s report doesn’t say a whole lot that is new. But it does package up a lot of the information that has been circulating for several years now. And it does, perhaps, represent the goad that we will need to develop a comprehensive national energy policy – one that will truly support the development of alternative energy sources, phase out carbon emissions on a reasonable time scale, and promote conservation.

I hope you will not choose to simply accept my interpretation of the report. Read it yourself at www.npc.org.

Meanwhile, I wonder: It is too much to hope for, but wouldn’t it be great if the money that we are pouring into the Iraq rat-hole – more than $100 billion per year – were invested in solving our upcoming energy problems?

There may or may not be a real terrorist threat to America based in Iraq. But there’s definitely a threat to our way of life if energy supplies become tight.

Maybe it’s time to start putting our nation’s resources into the real threat.

Journal publisher Dave Churchill’s column runs on Fridays.