Fossils Fuel Oil Spill Debate

Jerry Labriola is letting his GOP show with his short-sighted obsession with what a moratorium on drilling could cost us today. We will be paying for the tragedy in the Gulf for years if not decades exactly because of this penny-wise/pound-foolish approach to energy.

The Democrats are right to push for a moratorium on all drilling until it is clear that the technology for preventing future such disasters – and the chain of command to put that technology into place – is well-established. The cost to Gulf Coast companies will be short-term and should be laid at the feet of BP. The cost for drilling without safeguards will be paid by all of us.

Broadwater was stopped in its tracks (thanks, Rosa!) exactly because of these concerns. The problem is not Government or even BP's inability to fix this mess – the problem is the drastic measures we're needing to take to feed our dependence on fossil fuels. Let's put people to work harnessing less harmful forms of energy and reduce our energy consumption. And let's stop with the finger-pointing and work together. No amount of money will bring back the ecosystem that is being ravaged as we speak in the Gulf; but common sense and common purpose could help us turn this crisis into an opportunity.

As a life-long shoreline resident, I have full confidence that Rep. Rosa DeLauro is our best hope to protect Connecticut's shoreline and specifically the Long Island Sound from the type of disaster that can result from under-regulated, overzealous off-shore oil drilling. During her time as a Representative, Rosa has protected the sound from the Broadwater and gasline proposals and displayed an unwavering committment to environmental sustainability and protection.

The fact that Mr. Labriola refuses to make any committment regarding our insane dependence on oil and what he would do to reduce it and end (or at the very least regulate and reduce) off-shore drilling is troubling. Furthermore, his claim that the proper response to disasters like the one occurring off the Gulf Coast is to cut entitlements is mind-boggling. Connecticut and specifically the 3rd District, cannot afford to even consider electing someone with such skewed views of such an important issue, especially when we have the opportunity to send Rosa DeLauro, one of the strongest supporters of environmental issues relevant to the state, back to Congress.

How's this for choosing between the lesser of two evils: Labriola says it's too early to say whether or not off-shore drilling is worth the risk (not to mention the cost), despite the fact that all the "easy" oil in the world is gone. We're now chasing the hard to get (more expensive) stuff and paying the consequences. Note that the Deepwater Horizon disaster comes as a result of the deepest ever drilling project. Ask yourself: why are they going so far for so little? Is it maybe becoming harder and harder to get?

Meanwhile, Blumenthal says we should call for a moratorium on new drilling. Thanks, Dick. I thought that was pretty obvious after the DWH catastrophe. But, how about some efforts to wean ourselves away from this oily teat of death... before it ruins us. We should be investing what little money we have in alternatives if only to create a buffer as oil production declines (nothing will every truly replace oil's capabilities).

On that topic, Labriola said we should replace oil as alternatives get cheap and become more available. Alternatives will never be cheap. In fact nothing will replace the wealth of oil in terms of it's net energy ratio, or, the amount of energy you produce versus what you invest. Light, sweet crude is about 200 to 1 in our favor; very cheap. The best alternatives are maybe 10 to 1, some like ethanol and hydrogen are sure net energy losers! The only real "solution" - (maybe "adaptation" is a better word since our survival depends on it) - is for everyone to use a lot less energy. Especially here in the U.S. where we use much more energy per capita than anywhere else in the world.

I know that's a hard pill to swallow when you've all been told your whole lives that unlimited progress and development and constant technological innovation are the only possible paths of civilization. That idea crashes head on with the fact of living on a planet full of finite resources, many of which have already begun to decline.

Mr. Labriola's vapidity on the subject of energy is striking and indicates he's nowhere near ready for Congress. His assumption is that hydrocarbons are "cheap and affordable". Wake up sir. We've dropped a trillion $ into the Iraq/Afghanistan invasion attempting to secure hydrocarbon resources and we'll lose billions of $ of economic activity as a result of the BP spill.

Wake up America. We all own this spill because we let it happen.

Great, let's look for ways to increase the cost of gasoline at the pump. decreased supply = higher prices. A ban on offshore drilling isn't the solution. If they do resolve what went wrong with Deepwater Horizon, then something else will go wrong next. There's thousands of things that can go wrong on an oil rig, not just the one blowout that happened on April 20. It's not like they solve one thing and all will be dandy. If there is a ban to fix things, it'll have to be in place for decades for any change in quality/safety to become noticable. ...

Our economy, living arrangement and the organization of the country is based on growing access each year to cheap energy. Without it, all the systems and infrastructures we've developed over the last 60 or so years, are completely useless and unworkable.
Aside from the weak environmental argument, domestic oil production is dumb because this country just doesn't have much oil under its territory and it is likely just not wise to make any large investment in drilling because the amount of energy output needed to get the oil will just mean wasted energy that could have been used for something else other than what amounts to an expensive nostalgia for an energy age that only has a few decades of viability left.
We send about $400 billion of our nation's dwindling wealth to the middle east each year for oil. We use that energy to continue the systems and infrastructures that guarantee our dependence on that foreign oil. It is quite possible the most idiotic thing ever. However, we should continue to import lots of oil-perhaps increasingly more so-but we should use it to reorganize our country in a way that will decrease our demand for cheap energy in the decades to come. We need a national development plan that demands walkable self-sustaining communities connected to other walkable communities by transit. The model of developing cheap land simply because its cheap is no longer viable. Other considerations like solar orientation, soil quality, and geographic location will be more important. The perfect model of what needs to be done is pre-1930s urban design (not necessarily architecture), which should be copied, reproduced and implemented into every post 1930s community with the addition of the considerations listed above so that new technologies-solar panels, green roofs, rainwater collection, etc-can be efficiently applied.

The other important thing is that simply throwing money into renewable energy now with the hopes of those technologies being able to support the systems and infrastructures of a cheap oil era is just not wise. Renewable energy is the future, but it cannot replace oil. The part that politicians and others seem to not understand is that we need to implement new standards of organizing our habitat so that renewable energy can actually supply us with the demands we have. This is not a case of switching our old batteries for new ones, the process is much more difficult than that.

Only if the U.S. government can come up with fool-proof plans to prevent future spills, Blumenthal said, should any new drills be allowed to hit the ocean floor.


U.S Government and Fool-Proof plan? is he serious?

JH,

Our problem isn't stupidity...its greed. If you believe reserve estimates there are about a trillion barrels of oil left which is about 50 more years of supply. 50 years is very short time to transition the world to alternative energy and its stupid to wait any longer. Nevertheless, we're doing so because very powerful interests (big oil) know that there is $100 trillion sitting in the ground and they want to cash in on as much of it as possible. Its a planetary game of chicken played by Exxon Mobil and the human race.

How many of you folks against off shore oil drilling have air conditioning in your homes? Come on now fess up ...

BILL,

No AC here...and I only drive about 5K per year.

Good point though...we can all do better.

So is there a legal reason for Blumenthals comments or is he just grandstanding as usual.

Bill,

I shouldn't even respond since you seem to be missing something, but just to disprove your point:

I have No Air-conditioner and No Car.

Thanks for your concern.

*Fun fact: Half of all the oil that is extracted on earth is used for GASOLINE. It's long past time to cut down on your driving.

This is classic Blumenthal. A knee-jerk reaction for every headline. Then when oil or utility prices rise he scolds the oil companies or the utilities.

If you look up hypocrite on Wikipedia, the Bloomers picture should show up. The guy is all sizzle and no steak.

Natural gas is a logical replacement for oil but it still needs to be drilled. And our infrastructure for natural gas cars in non-existent. Oil is here for a long time until everything else becomes competitive. So we need to keep our domestic supplies up or we will always be at the mercy of the middle east. The transition to non-oil energy is going to take a long time. We need infrastructure increases in electrical distribution. We can't do that in a recession and not damage the economy which the Democrats are doing a fine job of destroying.

<i>So is there a legal reason for Blumenthal's comments...JSCHMIDT</i>

How about that he is running for Senator?

Or how about the fact that he's still AG and that BP is already passing on costs of the accident to the American public and the very highly likely event of BP embedding other costs into the cost of their product? (effectively passing on the total cost of their own huge f#@&-up to us...and their stockholders and management continuing to make obscene profits.)

Do either of those two reasons explain his comments to you?

Gary Brudvig, who is Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale, led a national seminar on "Renewable Energy" in 2007:
http://www.teachers.yale.edu/curriculum/index.php?url=http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/nationalcurriculum/units/2007/5/

In response to New Haven Public School teachers' requests, Gary Brudvig is leading a similar, Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute seminar on "Renewable Energy" in 2010; he also gave an Institute talk this year on "Green Chemistry," on which he led a national seminar in 2009.

G. Brudvig is a founding member of a team of chemists known as the Yale Solar Group:
http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=7518

John Wargo, Professor of Environmental Risk Analysis and Policy at Yale, led a 2009 seminar on "Energy, Climate, Environment" that produced the following volume of curriculum units teachers developed as Fellows:
http://www.teachers.yale.edu/curriculum/index.php?url=http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/nationalcurriculum/units/2009/7/

David Bercovici, who is Professor of Geophysics and Chair of the Geology and Geophysics Department, led a 2007 Institute seminar on "The Science of Natural Disasters" in which Fellows developed units such as one by (Hill Regional Career H.S. teacher) Zakia Parrish, Ph.D., on "Greenhouse Gases: The Chemistry Behind the Culprits": http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/guides/2007/4/07.04.05.x.html

Robin- Blumenthal thinks he can create jobs by suing companies. He is rated the worst AG by the Competitive Investment Institute for reaching beyond his authority. He went after a computer company for fraud and went to the extent of locking up the president. She sued the state and won $18 million for abusing its power and violating her constitutional rights. He is part of the reason the state ranks at the bottom of every business friendly rating. He didn't file suit against the healthcare bill as other AGs did and this law will cost us dearly because it doesn't reduce costs. He didn't go after Dodd for the Country wide mortgage. He is Dodd lite. I can't believe people will support the Democrats since they are the ones that have sunk this state by increasing the govt workforce and buying into the union contracts that are unsustainable. We get only 69% of every dollar back for every dollar we send to DC. Only 32% of the gas tax is used for transportation and the rest goes to the general fund and the Democrats want tolls. We cannot afford the big govt of the Democrats and Bluementhal is one of the worst.

Robn,
My comment was made with the assumption that we are going to continue spending lots of money on oil. My point was that we should be using the oil to build a better future and not on stuff that is going to be useless once global oil production peaks and goes into decline. The systematic reorganization of the country would require enormous investments in energy, creation of millions of new jobs and an end product that allows us to have a good standard of living without enormous energy consumption, high health care costs, high infrastructure maintenance costs, etc. Let's spend a trillion dollars on oil, but let's actually get something out of it like an efficient national network of rail, trolley lines in our cities and towns, shipping ports, permeable roadways that absorb moisture to reduce capacity on our sewers, good school buildings, nice parks, crop-diverse farms, etc.
The current plan seems to be to act like cheap oil production only rises exponentially so we can afford to put huge investments into interstate highways, suburban sprawl and global networks of goods and produce transportation. Once the reality of finite resources sets in, we'll be left with crumbling highways, abandoned subdivisions and no infrastructure for a post-oil living arrangement.


Also US oil production peaked in the 1970s, this country just doesn't sit on top of giant oil fields. No matter how hard we wish, we are not going to domestically produce anywhere near enough oil to support our current way of life.

Chuck rockin' the kippah!

An arguably relevant link:


http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/scitech-news/2010/04/21/vt-environmentalist-loves-land/


Advocate for Life Affirming Independent

America represents just 5% of the world's population yet continues to use more than 26% of the world's energy.

With cheap and abundant energy beginning to disappear as the world's population moves toward 7 billion people, hard energy realities are now appearing for everyone to see and deal with.

America has no birth right claim to cheap energy nor is the American standard of living "not for discussion" as previous presidential administrations have told us.

All forms of energy, fossil and renewable are needed going to forward to keep the society and economy in decent health.

It would be a great help if people in the fossil fuel industry would stop only talking about the upside of what they do while willfully ignoring all the costs incurred in using fossil fuels.

People in the renewable energy industry should stop making the oil and gas industry the center of all evil while they benefit from the very products the oil and gas industry produce including ironically enough many of the materials used in green energy technologies.

Politicians of all stripes would be a big help if they would begin to really educate themselves about all types of energy instead of just telling the American public what they want to hear at the moment.

You said "Great, let's look for ways to increase the cost of gasoline at the pump. decreased supply = higher prices. A ban on offshore drilling isn't the solution. If they do resolve what went wrong with Deepwater Horizon, then something else will go wrong next. There's thousands of things that can go wrong on an oil rig, not just the one blowout that happened on April 20."

First off, gasoline prices at the end of the day are controlled by big oil. Remember when prices hit 4/5 bucks a gallon and we all went broke? Oil companies made record profits. They didn't raise prices because oil was harder to get and drilling regulation had been flushed down the toilet by Bush/Cheney. People can say it had to do with the wars in the middle east, but we get less than 2% of our oil from there.
The fact is, those greedy oil execs will bleed us dry and destroy our environment till they use up all the oil and then they'll move on to something new. Most of us are already struggling and paying too much for energy. The only people who will suffer a significant amount more from a ban on drilling and investment in clean energies are the oil companies who will go out of business. Well I say good riddance. They've done more damage than we should have ever let them get away with.
Secondly, we stand to save a great deal from investing in clean energies because we will end up paying for the damage to the environment as tax payers and consumers. Just look at the gulf. All those fisheries put out of business, say even one family that could have made a living, paid taxes, and created jobs on the gulf is put out of business by a major catastrophe that pro oil folks admit we can't prevent, we pay for it when that family is forced to live off the system. Now think about all the lives this is effecting. Our tax dollars pay for the clean up even if BP assumes financial responsibility, our people will have to inspect and oversee. One way or another we end up paying and big business goes on polluting, ducking responsibility, and robbing us blind.
And, by the way, there is no such thing as safe nuclear power or clean coal. Just because you place the adjective in front of it doesn't make it so. Can we please avoid making the same mistake all over again?
Thank you for the story NHI this is infuriating and then some. How dare Labriola suggest we ditch healthcare to pay the costs for these major corporations. Republicans aren't against social services unless they're for poor people, they're totally in favor of hand outs to big business. It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.

The amount of oil that has gushed into the Gulf ecosystem would have met US consumption needs for about five days. The fact that oil companies are going after difficult-to-access deposits located under miles of ocean and bedrock is a testament to the unpleasant fact that we are addicted to oil at a time when demand is steadily increasing due to the rise of India and China, and we are approaching peak production on the supply end. Even the International Energy Agency -- whose calculations about resource depletion have recently been called into question as overly optimistic and subject to political manipulation by oil-producing countries -- admits that the world needs to find the equivalent of four new Saudi Arabias to feed growing demand at a time when the depletion rate in old fields of the North Sea and other major producing areas is running at 7% year on year, an alarming depletion figure which keeps being modified upwards as new data comes in. The statistics arm of the US Energy Department just released International Energy Outlook for 2010 -- this documents sees global oil supply as essentially flat for the rest of the decade, and that may be a best-case scenario. Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens -- who was recently in Connecticut and who is hardly a tree-hugging Cassandra -- says that world oil production peaked in 2005 and has already entered terminal decline. This is clearly an unsustainable situation. The only question is whether we will adapt to a low-energy future on our own terms, or whether we will be forced to adapt by circumstances we can no longer control -- economic chaos, geopolitical instability, and environmental catastrophe like the one currently afflicting the Gulf region. Personally I would prefer the former. The teabagger approach seems to be to whistle past the graveyard.

JH,

I think we agree...my central point though is that Exxon Mobil would happily slit your grandmothers throat rather than turn their back on even a small percentage of $100T.

JSCHMIDT,

So let me see if I can get your points straight..
Dick Blumenthal should leave alone companies that spill millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and he shouldn't support health care for all Americans and he is somehow responsible for the fact that we pay more out in taxes than we get back (and red states get more back than they pay in)?

John Martens was also at the even. Why was their no coverage?

As abg pointed out, the IEA has confirmed Peak Oil, the US Joint Forces Command has confirmed it, leading oil economists like Matthew Simmons have confirmed it as well as expert geologists.

Then yesterday, this:

<i>"I think over the next 5 to 10 years we will peak in the production of what's called conventional or easy oil. . . . We will not in anyway peak relative to the resources left in the earth. But the resources left in the earth will be higher risk and higher cost to produce, which will increase the cost basis on which ultimately gas prices are set."</i>

That's from Shell President, John Hofmeister.

So, I think we can all agree, oil is getting harder and harder to get and thus more expensive and more dangerous (Deep Water Horizon). We all need to work together to reduce our energy usage as there is nothing that will ever replace oil. No more denial!

In the long run, fossil fuels come with a bigger price tag. Go solar and go green! You'll save money and help save our planet! We should def. depend more on renewable energy than fossil fuels to avoid problems like the oil spill from happening again.

Fossil fuels come with a bigger price tag!

http://www.sunetric.com/_blog/Blog/post/Fossil_Fuels_Come_with_a_Price/

Kristine
www.sunetric.com

Blumenthal is a reactive politician. Has he ever come up with a unique idea of his own?

robn- Blumenthal is a Democrat. The last thing CT needs representing us is another Democrat with questionable ethics who just likes to get his ego stroked. The Dems have ruined this state. And the AG has no jurisdiction over any oil company operating outside the state.

On the topic-

"The true value of energy is the net energy"
by David Murphy

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/53082