“As long as I’m President, we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure, and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people. We don’t have to choose between one or the other, we can do both.”
Will Obama’s audacious oil play prove to be a Dukakis-in-a-tank moment, as his political opposition believes? Whether it is or not, the climate-alarmist Left is steamed. Why? Because the President’s paean to petroleum sets back the idea that big bad oil is on the way out. Game-set-match for the robust continuing carbon-based energy age.
We have come full circle from George W. Bush’s anti-oil moment in his 2006 State of the Union speech when he opined:
…We have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.
“The range of energy possibilities grouped under the heading ‘solar’ could meet one-fifth of U.S. energy needs within two decades.”
– Robert Stobaugh and Daniel Yergin, “The End of Easy Oil,” in Stobaugh and Yergin, eds., Energy Future, Report of the Energy Project of the Harvard Business School (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 12.
”I think … the consensus … is after the year 2000, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of our energy could come from solar technologies, quite easily.”
– Scott Sklar, Solar Energy Industries Association (1987).
“Before maybe the end of this decade, I see wind and solar being cost-competitive without subsidy with new fossil fuel.”
– DOE Secretary Stephan Chu, Address to Pew Charitable Trusts, March 23, 2011.
Yesterday’s Part I on the long history of solar power ended with two quotations from energy historian Wilson Clark in his 1974 book, Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction:
…“In 1908, [Frank] Shuman formed the Sun Power Company and convinced English financiers to back his efforts to build larger plants using the flat-plate collectors.
“Not satisfied with such direct benefits as he derives from sunshine, man has developed numerous ways of utilizing solar radiation indirectly and of appropriating energies other than his own.”
– Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industry (Harper & Brothers, 1933), p. 43.
“Although much interest in the scientific community has been focused on solar energy at various times in history, widespread development of solar power equipment has never been achieved—primarily because of the high cost of developing solar power compared to that of technologies utilizing cheap fossil fuels.”
– Wilson Clark, Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 379.
Solar electricity has a long history, not unlike its cousin windpower. The infant industry argument does not apply, and solar’s diluteness and intermittency suggest that this off-grid starter energy will not be an on-grid resource this century if not far beyond.…