Green Fuels: Oil and Coal

Green Fuels: Oil and Coal By Jonah Goldberg

I recently wrote a column on oil (and coal) as “green fuels.” How are they green? By moving us off “renewable” energies that are more damaging to the environment. Since I think this is one of the most underappreciated and infuriating aspects of the energy debate, I thought I’d revise and extend my remarks, as they say on the Hill.

Everyone takes as a given that the environment would be better off without oil and coal. And it would be better off if there was a better fuel available. But, not counting nuclear, there isn’t. Not even close (as Ken Green notes earlier on this blog). And, if you ignore the climate change argument, fossil fuels have been an incalculable gift to mankind (it’s worth noting that environmentalists launched their anti-petroleum jihad before anyone was concerned with global warming). Without fossil fuels, we might not have cut the Malthusian knot that was causing us to burn through a wide assortment of “renewable” resources.

Kerosene helped wean America (and everyone else) off our “addiction” to whales. Oil and coal helped end our addiction to wood for, well, everything. Wood was not only a heating fuel, it was instrumental to railroads and all manner of construction. Ronald Bailey has noted that “Railroads, the 19th century’s ‘modern’ form of transportation, consumed nearly 25 percent of all the wood used in America, for both track ties and fuel.” In 1900, New York City alone supported over 120,000 horses who befouled the water and the air in the city, but also required vast amounts of land to supply the hay that fueled them.

Today, more American land is covered by forests—by far—than at the end of the 19th century. By the 1860s, Massachusetts and Connecticut had lost 70 percent of their forests. Today nearly 70 percent of those states are forested again. Vermont was once nearly denuded but now nearly 80 percent of it is covered in trees. In 1880, New York was only one-quarter forests. Now, more than two-thirds of the Empire State is covered in forests. The same holds true for much of Europe. In 1860s Switzerland, 18 percent of the land was forested. In 2005 30 percent was forested. In the 1810s, Denmark was 4 percent forested, in 2005, that country was 11 percent forested. Scotland in the 1920s: 5 percent; in 2005: 17 percent. France during the 1830s was 14 percent forested, in 2005 it was double that. These numbers come from a National Academy of Sciences report “Returning forests analyzed with the forest identity.” It will be no surprise to my colleague Mark Perry that forestation levels increase with increases in GDP (after a society passes a certain minimal wealth threshold).

There’s one last irony. Matt Ridley, author of the indispensable new book The Rational Optimist, notes that history if full of examples of mankind literally running out of “renewable resources” or effectively exhausting them—mastadons, whales, passenger pigeons, guano, Lebanon cedars, etc.—but the one resource everyone has insisted is about to disappear keeps increasing. “In 1914, the U.S. Bureau of Mines predicted that American oil reserves would last ten years,” writes Ridley. In 1939, the Department of Interior said American oil would last 13 years. Twelve years later, it said oil would last another 13 years. President Jimmy Carter announced in the 1970s that “we could use up all the proven reserves in the world by the end of the next decade.”

And yet, Ridley goes on to say, “In 1970, there were 550 billion barrels of oil reserves in the world and between 1970 and 1990 the world used 600 billion barrels of oil. So reserves should have been overdrawn by 50 billion barrels by 1990. In fact, by 1990 unexploited reserves amounted to 900 billion barrels.” And that doesn’t count the tar sands in Alberta or the shales of Venezuela and the Rocky Mountains, which collectively contain 6 trillion barrels of heavy oil, 20 times the proven reserves in Saudi Arabia.

Now, none of this is to say that I hope we’re dependent on oil forever or that oil and coal don’t have significant downsides. Or even that the specter of climate change shouldn’t be a concern. But, even taking the Gulf spill into account, the benefits of fossil fuels still far outweigh the costs.

http://blog.american.com/?p=15524