By Richard Brigham
Once in a while we encounter a memoir, article or statement from someone who lost a bid for public office that elicits a collective sigh of relief that the author did not prevail in that contest.
Robert Borks’ post-Supreme-Court-nomination-battle memoir comes to mind. Doug Roulstone’s guest commentary, “America Can and Should Gain Energy Independence” (Feb. 27) is another case in point.
Although it is the case that the United States has energy reserves that are currently un- or under-utilized, what Mr. Roulstone fails to tell us is that for the most part the exploitation of these resources would involve economic and environmental costs almost beyond imagining. This is particularly the case with oil shale, the recovery of which would essentially pulverize the states that harbor them.
For a vision of what oil shale operations would involve, look at the tar sands mining unfolding in northern Alberta. Here we find boreal forests reduced, on a vast scale, to moonscapes dotted with more than 30 square miles of toxic holding ponds (so much so that they are fatal to waterfowl unwise enough to alight on them), surrounded by drug-and-crime-addled transient towns atop poisoned water tables. The extraction process is so complex that the cost per barrel is 10 times that of Saudi crude, takes enormous quantities of natural gas , and so much water that surrounding water-bearing strata are at risk of being sucked dry. This, in a very wet region. How would such an operation play out in arid Utah?
While the Alberta tar sands operation may be a particularly nightmarish one (and far from the “carbon neutral footprint” Mr. Roulstone’s piece breezily attributes to the process), the other “hard” sources — coal, oil, nuclear — also carry economic/environmental costs that range from severe to merely troubling.
As the biologist Barry Commoner famously reminded us in his 1971 book, “The Closing Circle,” there is no such thing as a free lunch when we extract from nature. Even the emerging “alternative” sources, such as biofuels, can be fraught with unintended but very severe drawbacks. If we start growing fuel where we used to grow corn, we stand to disrupt global food economies, in addition to calling on huge amounts of fossil fuel to manufacture a product lower in BTUs per gallon, and an emitter of dangerously high levels of nitrous oxide, a pollutant with grave consequences for human health.
Even solar energy, the Holy Grail for those of us who look for the greenest solutions to the energy crisis, is beset with difficulties; the manufacturing of photovoltaic cells has nasty byproducts, and a solar economy would require lots of acreage to collect what is a scattered and low-quality energy source (though give me solar over fossil fuels anytime).
Nuclear energy makes almost no economic sense particularly when you consider the life cycle of the plants — they have to be decommissioned after about 40 years — and radioactive waste disposal remains an unsolved problem with obvious national security implications.
Our often heedless quest for more ways to satisfy our expanding energy demands conjures images of a morbidly obese person who, having laid waste to all the pizza- and ice cream-parlors in town, is clawing through the dumpsters and landfills in a pathetic attempt to meet an endless lust for … MORE. Going on a diet would make much more sense, and America surely needs to go on an energy diet. If we would make serious reductions in energy demand, we wouldn’t have to tear up the planet trying to increase the supply.
Richard Brigham of Everett taught at Everett Community College for 30 years, and developed a course there on environmental sociology.
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