Blowing Green Smoke (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust -- Apr. 4, 2011

"We also have Secretary Steven Chu, my Energy Secretary. Where is Steven? There he is over there." --President Obama at Georgetown U last week

Blame Steven Chu, then, because when it comes to America's energy predicament, the president has been woefully misinformed.

Mr. Obama pawned off a roster of notions and proposals already product-tested in the public meme-o-sphere. Almost everyone of these ideas is inconsistent with reality, based on faulty premises, or represents some kind of magical thinking. What they have in common is that they're ideas the public wants to hear, whether they are truthful or not, because we don't want to change the way we live.

The central idea in Mr. Obama's speech is that we will reduce our oil imports by one-third in a decade. This is a gross distortion of reality. The truth is that our oil imports will be reduced automatically, whether we like it or not. The process is already underway. The nations that export oil to us are using much more of their own oil even while their supplies have passed peak production and entered depletion. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Mexico have some of the highest population growth-rates in the world. They sell gasoline to their own people for less than a dollar a gallon. At the same time China and India are driving more cars and importing a lot more of the world's declining supply. (China has perhaps the equivalent of a four-year supply of its own oil in the ground, and India has next-to-zero oil of its own).

One meme circulating around the Web these days is that the USA has the equivalent of "three Saudi Arabias" in the shale oil fields of North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. That is not true. A lot of this magical thinking focuses on the Bakken fields of Dakota. We're currently producing less than 400,000 barrels a day out of Bakken and the projected maximum 10 years from now is around 800,000. We use 20 million barrels a day in the United States running suburbia, Wal Mart, and the U.S. military. By the way, Bakken shale oil requires extensive rock fracturing operations -- "fracking" --which means a lot of horizontal drilling, which means a lot of steel pipe. It is not just a matter of sticking a steel straw in the ground like we did in Texas in 1932.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/all-content/edited/blowing-green-smoke-james-howard-kunstler.html

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1. Love this part:

How about Canada's tar sands? Well, first of all, they belong to Canada, not us, unless we want to change that -- and that could be politically messy. The tar sands will never produce more than 3 million barrels a day. The operations are already too huge, costly, and damaging to the northern watershed. Canada is our number one source of imported oil, but China would also like to buy Canadian oil. Are we planning to invoke the Monroe Doctrine to prevent Canada from selling its oil to parties outside the Western Hemisphere? That could be messy, too.

Ya think?

[TheWraith]

2. We don't need energy, after all Y2K is going to destroy civilization.

At least, that was what Kunstler predicted.

Why does anyone still listen to this clown? He's a shock-jock of editorial writing. He comes up with loud, flashy trash talk to get people to pay attention, and counts on them forgetting what he said after he said it.