FoxNews.com Sells Its Readers On Oil, Oil, Oil
Reported by Guest Blogger - January 3, 2011 -
By Hula
The Koch brothers could have produced this mind-numbing commercial for petroleum. It's meant as an editorial, but still...
A few excerpts:
We do not desire oil irrationally; we consume it because it is a beneficial, life-sustaining product. Oil is unmatched as a concentrated, safe, and affordable source of portable energy. And our lives depend on such a source of energy... We are not "addicted" to oil any more than we are addicted to the myriad values it makes possible, like fresh food, imported electronics, going to work, or visiting loved ones....To attempt to implement these on a large scale would bankrupt Americans through home and business electricity costs alone—to attempt add a new generation of electric cars to the mix would make the costs and scarcity that much greater.
...Solar and wind cannot even provide reliable, expensive electricity, because they use inherently intermittent sources of power--sunshine and wind gusts. Whereas coal, natural gas, and nuclear can generate the massive, precise, and reliable flows of power a modern economy require, wind and solar cannot—which is why they are always used as auxiliary, not primary, sources of power on electric grids. Think about it: Would you want your parent’s hospital room powered by the wind?
...To the extent it becomes expensive to extract oil from the earth in sufficient quantities, we can be sure that entrepreneurs will work to make substitute sources of fuel based on legitimately promising technologies, such as natural gas or coal, or that they will seek to create battery-powered vehicles charged with nuclear power or some yet undeveloped technology—to the extent that the government refrains from its policy of heavily restrict mining, drilling, and nuclear technology. It is government policy, not the finite quantity of any given raw material, that is the real threat to future energy supplies.
The upshot: we will never run out the energy we get from oil--unless we run out of freedom.
You really need to read the whole thing to get the full effect.
