Dear Friends,
It seems to me that if the Maya had not polluted their own drinking water, with the corpses of their sacrificial victims, they would not have collapsed as a civilization. What we are doing with energy is almost the same thing. People in the future will say, “How could they have been so stupid?” As they burn methane hydrates to power their industry.
We are told that we must not use nuclear energy because it is unsafe. Demonstrably so, in that we have had three nuclear disasters, since the inception of nuclear energy. Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl, the total estimated death toll of all three is less than 8000 people over a 65 year span. This death toll is considered to many to warrant the dismantling of all nuclear power stations.
While at the same time children are killed on bicycles at the rate of 300 a year. If 300 children are killed a year times 65 years, there are 19,500 children, killed on bicycles in the same span of time, (in the USA only, the other victims are worldwide, none are in the US). Given these facts, we can only conclude that bicycles are far more dangerous than nuclear power plants, and under the logic of closing nuclear power plants, we must outlaw bicycles. It follows necessarily. The only difference is that the children killed on bikes are spaced over a greater territory and the people effected by a nuclear plant are in the neighborhood of the plant itself.
But given Ohm’s law electricity production must be as close as possible to keep the losses in transmission as low as possible. Each time the voltage is stepped up for transmission or stepped down for distribution there is loss. This loss is magnified by distance. So, regions that are also point draws for electricity need large producers of electricity close, to keep transmission losses under control.
Coal does most of the heavy lifting today though. The USA has more accessible coal than any other country. Hundreds of years worth of coal, but with the increasing regulation, driving up the costs of coal fired electricity production, both in mining and in burning coal, the price of electricity will necessarily skyrocket in the next few years.
Coal to oil is a possibility but environmentalists have labeled it as Nazi oil, because the Nazis used this technique to produce oil for their industry when the Allies had destroyed Germany’s access to the sources of oil. The label seems to have weight because no plant has been successfully permitted in the USA that I know of. But I never hear anyone, except me, calling nationalized healthcare Nazi healthcare, even though it was the Nazis that introduced single payer to Europe.
Natural Gas is also plentiful in the US. With the implementation of a new technique for the extraction of natural gas from difficult strata another hundred years supply has been opened up in a band from Tennessee to Texas. Unfortunately there have already been lawsuits filed to stop this process due to potential environmental impacts.
The long and short of it is this, modern economies need economically priced energy, without which economies grind to a halt. Energy is a primary input to almost ever aspect of economic activity. From the package delivery guy’s gas price to the heavy steel manufacturer’s price for heat for his steel, the price of energy can be a deciding factor, if a thing is better produced in one place than another.
With the continued and stubborn employment dilemma in the USA, one would think the government would seek to lift barriers to employment, like the price of energy. But this government seems intent on driving up the price of energy to the point of breaking the back of not only the US economy but the economies of every country in the World.
In this case the victims are the Coal, nuclear and natural gas industries and the well is our collective economies. Not much different from throwing the heartless corpses of your victims into your own drinking water is it?
