“Energy is the master resource, because energy enables us to convert one material into another. As natural scientists continue to learn more about the transformation of materials from one form to another with the aid of energy, energy will be even more important.”
– Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 162.
Energy is the master resource, as Simon says. Even anti-energy zealots have admitted as much in their more sober moments. “A reliable and affordable supply of energy is absolutely critical to maintaining and expanding economic prosperity where such prosperity already exists and to creating it where it does not,” Obama’s science advisor John Holdren once said. (1)
UK Energy Trouble
The indispensability of affordable, plentiful energy has come to the fore as anti-energy policies have collided against human needs.…
Remember all this? America is running out of natural gas. Prices will soar, making imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) and T. Boone Pickens’ wind farm plan practical, affordable and inevitable. Well, reality intervened. We are having an energy transformation, but just the opposite of what the non-market energy planners predicted.
Shale Gas Revolution
Barely two years later, America (and the world) are tapping vast, previously undreamed-of energy riches – as drillers discover how to produce gas from shale, coal and tight sandstone formations, at reasonable cost. They do it by pumping a water, sand and proprietary chemical mixture into rocks under very high pressure, fracturing or “fracking” the formations, and keeping the cracks open, to yield trapped methane.
Within a year, U.S. recoverable shale gas reserves alone rose from 340 trillion cubic feet to 823 tcf, the Energy Department estimates.…
What am I missing? Is there some aspect of our inane energy policies that I am failing to understand, much less appreciate?
“We the People” just booted a boatload of spendthrifts out of Congress, after they helped engineer a $1.3 trillion deficit on America’s FY-2010 budget and balloon our cumulative national debt to $13.7 trillion.
And the “bipartisan White House deficit reduction panel” chimed in with a 50-page draft proposal, offering suggestions for $3.8 trillion in future budgetary savings. The proposal targets $100 billion in Defense Department weapons programs, healthcare benefits and overseas bases. It also proposes a $13-billion cutback in the federal workforce and lining out $400 million in unnecessary printing costs.
Yet, amazingly, not even this independent commission was willing to eliminate the $6-billion sacred cow of annual ethanol subsidies!…