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If gas hydrates as well as shale gas, tight oil, oil sands and other unconventional sources can be tapped at reasonable cost, then the global energy picture looks radically different than it did only a few years ago. Suddenly it appears that there may be enough accessible hydrocarbons to power industrial civilization for centuries, if not millennia, to come.

So much for the specter of depletion, as a reason to adopt renewable energy technologies like solar power and wind power. Whatever may be the case with Peak Oil in particular, the date of Peak Fossil Fuels has been pushed indefinitely into the future. What about national security as a reason to switch to renewable energy?

The U.S., Canada and Mexico, it turns out, are sitting on oceans of recoverable natural gas. Shale gas is combined with recoverable oil in the Bakken “play” along the U.S.-Canadian border and the Eagle Ford play in Texas. The shale gas reserves of China turn out to be enormous, too. Other countries with now-accessible natural gas reserves, according to the U.S. government, include Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, France, Poland and India.

Because shale gas reserves are so widespread, the potential for blackmail by Middle Eastern producers and Russia will diminish over time. Unless opponents of fracking shut down gas production in Europe, a European Union with its own natural gas reserves will be far less subject to blackmail by Russia (whose state monopoly Gazprom has opportunistically echoed western Greens in warning of the dangers of fracking).

The U.S. may become a major exporter of natural gas to China — at least until China borrows the technology to extract its own vast gas reserves.

Two arguments for switching to renewable energy — the depletion of fossil fuels and national security — are no longer plausible. What about the claim that a rapid transition to wind and solar energy is necessary, to avert catastrophic global warming?

The scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low probability outcomes — a fact that explains why the world’s governments in practice treat reducing CO2 emissions as a low priority, despite paying lip service to it. But even if the worst outcomes were likely, the rational response would not be a conversion to wind and solar power but a massive build-out of nuclear power. Nuclear energy already provides around 13-14 percent of the world’s electricity and nearly 3 percent of global final energy consumption, while wind, solar and geothermal power combined account for less than one percent of global final energy consumption.

(The majority of renewable energy consists of CO2-emitting biomass — wood and dung used for fires by the world’s poor, plus crops used to make fuel; most of the remainder comes from hydropower dams denounced by Greens.)

The disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima have dramatized the real but limited and localized dangers of nuclear energy. While their initial costs are high, nuclear power plants generate vast amounts of cheap electricity — and no greenhouse gases. If runaway global warming were a clear and present danger rather than a low probability, then the problems of nuclear waste disposal and occasional local disasters would be minor compared to the benefits to the climate of switching from coal to nuclear power.

The arguments for converting the U.S. economy to wind, solar and biomass energy have collapsed. The date of depletion of fossil fuels has been pushed back into the future by centuries — or millennia. The abundance and geographic diversity of fossil fuels made possible by technology in time will reduce the dependence of the U.S. on particular foreign energy exporters, eliminating the national security argument for renewable energy. And if the worst-case scenarios for climate change were plausible, then the most effective way to avert catastrophic global warming would be the rapid expansion of nuclear power, not over-complicated schemes worthy of Rube Goldberg or Wile E. Coyote to carpet the world’s deserts and prairies with solar panels and wind farms that would provide only intermittent energy from weak and diffuse sources.

The mainstream environmental lobby has yet to acknowledge the challenge that the new energy realities pose to their assumptions about the future. Some environmentalists have welcomed natural gas because it is cleaner than coal and can supplement intermittent solar power and wind power, at times when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. But if natural gas is permanently cheaper than solar and wind, then there is no reason, other than ideology, to combine it with renewables, instead of simply using natural gas to replace coal in electricity generation.

Without massive, permanent government subsidies or equally massive penalty taxes imposed on inexpensive fossil fuels like shale gas, wind power and solar power may never be able to compete. For that reason, some Greens hope to shut down shale gas and gas hydrate production in advance. In their haste, however, many Greens have hyped studies that turned out to be erroneous.

In 2010 a Cornell University ecology professor and anti-fracking activist named Robert Howarth published a paper making the sensational claim that natural gas is a greater threat to the climate than coal. Howarth admitted, “A lot of the data we use are really low quality…”

Howarth’s error-ridden study was debunked by Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations and criticized even by the Worldwatch Institute, a leading environmentalist organization, which wrote: “While we share Dr. Howarth’s urgency about the need to transition to a renewable-based economy, we believe based on our research that natural gas, not coal, affords the cleanest pathway to such a future.”

A few years ago, many Green alarmists seized upon a theory that an ice age 600 million years ago came to an abrupt end because of massive global warming caused by methane bubbling up from the ocean floor. They warned that the melting of the ice caps or drilling for methane hydrates might suddenly release enough methane to cook the earth. But before it could be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster, the methane apocalypse theory was debunked recently by a team of Caltech scientists in a report for the science journal Nature.

All energy sources have potentially harmful side effects. The genuine problems caused by fracking and possible large-scale future drilling of methane hydrates should be carefully monitored and dealt with by government regulation. But the Green lobby’s alarm about the environmental side-effects of energy sources is highly selective. The environmental movement since the 1970s has been fixated religiously on a few “soft energy” panaceas — wind, solar, and biofuels — and can be counted on to exaggerate or invent problems caused by alternatives. Many of the same Greens who oppose fracking because it might contaminate some underground aquifers favor wind turbines and high-voltage power lines that slaughter eagles and other birds and support blanketing huge desert areas with solar panels, at the cost of exterminating much of the local wildlife and vegetation. Wilderness preservation, the original goal of environmentalism, has been sacrificed to the giant metallic idols of the sun and the wind.

The renewable energy movement is not the only campaign that will be marginalized in the future by the global abundance of fossil fuels produced by advancing technology. Champions of small-scale organic farming can no longer claim that shortages of fossil fuel feedstocks will force a return to pre-industrial agriculture.

Another casualty of energy abundance is the new urbanism. Because cars and trucks and buses can run on natural gas as well as gasoline and diesel fuel, the proposition that peak oil will soon force people around the world to abandon automobile-centered suburbs and office parks for dense downtowns connected by light rail and inter-city trains can no longer be taken seriously. Deprived of the arguments from depletion, national security and global warming, the campaign to increase urban density and mass transit rests on nothing but a personal taste for expensive downtown living, a taste which the suburban working-class majorities in most developed nations manifestly do not share.

Eventually civilization may well run out of natural gas and other fossil fuels that are recoverable at a reasonable cost, and may be forced to switch permanently to other sources of energy. These are more likely to be nuclear fission or nuclear fusion than solar or wind power, which will be as weak, diffuse and intermittent a thousand years from now as they are today. But that is a problem for the inhabitants of the world of 2500 or 3000 A.D.

In the meantime, it appears that the prophets of an age of renewable energy following Peak Oil got things backwards. We may be living in the era of Peak Renewables, which will be followed by a very long Age of Fossil Fuels that has only just begun.

15 Comments on "Everything you’ve heard about fossil fuels may be wrong"

SolarDaveGreen on Tue, 31st May 2011 9:30 pm 



Wow – centuries, if not millennia of withdrawing sequestered CO2 and pumping it into the environment. Does that deserve a little debunking?

Posted while pedaling, powered by me!

CXGZ61 on Tue, 31st May 2011 9:42 pm 



Finally an article that makes sense.

Rick on Tue, 31st May 2011 11:11 pm 



What corporate troll wrote this piece of BS. Total lies. These types of articles will be more common going forward, to keep the sheep from getting nervous. While in reality, this article is complete nonsense.

Graham on Tue, 31st May 2011 11:22 pm 



Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!

Funniest thing i’ve read all day.

Dusko on Tue, 31st May 2011 11:39 pm 



Wow, what a relief! Now I can go back to consuming blindly and destroying the Earth knowing that the reckoning has been postponed forever!

Oh wait, I thought peak oil was a liquid fuels crisis? It’s not a natural gas issue. Besides, doesn’t the price of natural gas already reflect this data? Natural gas is CHEAP!

RICHARD RALPH ROEHL on Wed, 1st Jun 2011 1:25 am 



This disinformational denial propagan-duh has been bought (and brought to ewe folks) by…?

“Der vorld isht flat… and dats der truth!” the minister of corp-rat media insisted with fang-full sneer-full grin. “An’ now vee shall in-Heil der herb… to salute der Chief Rat,” he continued.

CXGZ61 on Wed, 1st Jun 2011 2:58 am 



Its too bad so many of you have been programmed by the progressive media and indoctrinated by our terrible schools. Add to this the evidence now mounting that oil is constantly being produced deep inside the earth, that global warming is all about politics and not science and take an objective look at how much natural gas there is and you will realize all of these crises are manufactured for political gain. In fact, contrary to the what the propaganda machine is saying, the more energy I use the more religious I am.

DC on Wed, 1st Jun 2011 3:07 am 



Without massive, permanent government subsidies or equally massive penalty taxes imposed on Nuclear, Coal and Oil and shale gas, wind power and solar power be able to compete easily.(O wait, they all get massive subsidies NOW, with zero penalties)

There fixed.

I just love how corporate shills latent enviromentalism comes out when it comes to windfarms. There sooooo conernced about desert wildlife and birds all of a sudden! Who knew they were such green souls? But apparently, gas flaring, oil spills, pipeline breaks, nuclear disasters are just a cost a doing business, so thats all just fine.

(We really need stikeouts in these comments heh)

VP on Wed, 1st Jun 2011 4:19 am 



The writer forgot to add that corporate scientists recently discovered that smoking does not cause lung cancer or heart disease.

VP on Wed, 1st Jun 2011 4:22 am 



and that Judy Garland is still alive, and still singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow blue birds fly…”

Harquebus on Wed, 1st Jun 2011 9:01 am 



A pity there’s no such thing as “renewable energy” unless, you want to rewrite the laws of physics.

SilentRunning on Wed, 1st Jun 2011 11:44 am 



Everything you read in this article may well be a sack of bovine excrement.

Meanwhile, I notice that gas prices remain at stubbornly high levels, despite all the shrieking by the cornies that there’s unlimited amounts of the stuff lying around. Well cornies – why is that anyway????

If oil is infinite, the price should be too low to meter. Instead, it is rising rapidly. Duhhh Cornies – pull your heads out of your collective behinds…..

The_Virginian on Wed, 1st Jun 2011 12:00 pm 



Peak Oil is the end of CHEAP oil, not the complete end of petroleum.

The social, economic and environmental (that is also economic and social in the end) by Fracturing and contaminating the Aquifers that feed humans, their farms, and livestock can not be calculated 100% yet, but it looks bad after just 10 years of fracking in the USA.

Nuclear’s price tag is STILL being accounted for see enenews.com.

Alex Fiedler on Wed, 1st Jun 2011 12:57 pm 



In terms of manifest untruths per paragraph, this article is a standout. Historians analysing the 21st century will be looking for illustrative examples of self-interested mendacity to put in their textbooks. This article would be a prime candidate.

EDpeak on Thu, 2nd Jun 2011 5:21 am 



“solar or wind power, which will be as weak, diffuse and intermittent a thousand years from now as they are today”

THEY KNOW BETTER AT SALON.COM BUT CHOSE TO RUN THIS JUST TO GET ‘CONTROVERSY’ EYEABALLS..OK, MY REPONSE:

BOYCOTT SALON.COM

YOU’RE NOT GETTING MY EYEBALLS FOR YOUR ADVERTISERS NO MORE, AND I WILL SHARE WITH FRIENDS THE MUCH MUCH LOWER OPINION OF YOU I’VE COME TO AND WARN THEM AWAY

Encourage others to do likewise.