Energy demand will increase 58% over
the next 25 years.

Tupi field offshore Brazil 80 bil barrels in a formation 24 K yrs old supports abiotic theory of oil that it is formed inorganically w/in the mantle and seeps up into reservoirs. We have cleaned up tailpipe emissions enough, and I think the global scares on climate are designed to enrich investors in Algore's companies. Enough already!

This is bogus. Check out the thousands of scientists who say so and focus on sunspots. I can't believe anybody thinks we can outmaneuver the sun. Good Grief!

You say "I can't help but feel that we're making the right moves for the wrong reasons" and "The real focus should be on energy, not global warming".

IMHO You are absolutely right.

The IPCC has grossly exaggerated the effects of atmospheric CO2 on climate (as stated by many respected scientists). There is growing evidence from many different sources that atmospheric CO2 is not a significant driver of climate (oceans cooling, temperature patterns inconsistent with CO2 warming, etc, etc). The Global Warming scare simply has to collapse at some time, the sooner the better, allowing us to get back to real science.

In the meantime, you are absolutely right to point out that there won't be enough fossil fuel anyway, and that we should be worrying about our sources of energy not our "greenhouse gas" emissions.

Renewable energy is the way to go and Chris puts things into perspective. President Obama is on the right track.

I can not help but to state the obvious after reading this article that you may need help to get rid of an Obama desease. If you beleive what you write, get chesked ASAP. A hack from Chicago has take your critical thinking from you. What a pitty. Hope you will get well soon.

I don't look to Energy & Capital for political ideology and if this keeps up I won't look to it at all in the future. I think that holding American car manufacturers to an AVERAGE MPG standard across their entire fleet is outrageous. Perhaps they should be required to OFFER some cars that meet a certain MPG goal, but consumers must be allowed to decide which cars they want to buy. Detroit has low mileage vehicles but we consumers chose to buy SUVs and accepted the higher cost of fuel for them. When fuel costs soared, consumers started switching to higher MPG vehicles and the sales of SUVs plummeted. Car makers will offer what the market wants to buy, and setting up the government as the arbiter of consumer tastes runs counter to MY political philosophy. If something HAS to be done to shift buying patterns, a higher fuel tax - committed by law to be spent on road and bridge repair - would be a better solution. California succeeded in bankrupting most of their electric utilities; now they want to do the same to the car manufacturers. This may play well in Berkeley where most people ride bicycles anyway, but not where I live.

you say:
The effort to reduce greenhouse gases is no doubt urgent and necessary. A new study by a US team of environmental researchers, sponsored by the Department of Energy and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that even if carbon emissions were halted, global temperatures would remain high for another 1,000 years. Humanity's uncontrolled, unplanned, and unexamined experiment with the global climate already may be "irreversible."
I say where is your science to back this statement? where is the true science that says CO2 is a pollutant? which causes increased earth temp? Where is the science that says co2 has risen as a result of man, not sunspot activity?
The fact is that CO2 is NOT a pollutant nor a cause of earth temp rising, which indeed has been falling for the last 10 years! How about the approximately 30,000 scientists who say that Al gore and his 70 journalistic "scientists" who is/are dead wrong and a liar!--just to make himself and his ilk lots of bucks. Airborne chemicals indeed are a problem and need to be cleaned but CO2-forget it--you are blowing it out your ear, as well as other places.
Stick to making bucks not determinations that disagree with true science.

Chris
While I agree and appreciate all the great info on the stock market, I disagree wholeheartedly with your views on Climate Change, until recently call Global Warming by the zealous followers of the new religion founded by Al Gore.
Nost of these folks look at 1 to 3 year cycles and claim that 'the sky is falling'. 2008 [and 2009 lloks the same] was cooler than most years dating back to 1979.
In the 1300's Europe was an average 10 d cooler than now.
10000 years ago, most of Canada and the nortrhern USA was covered by up to 4 miles of ice. Now there's a big uproar 'cause the last remnents of it are still melting. If only Al and his followers had been around them they could have stopped the melting [ if you can believe lthem] and I and thousands of other farmers would not have spent our lives working the soil between the rocks left lby the glaciers. I could send you dozens of well researched article by renown scientists, who have debunked the new religion. Many of them have remained silent due to the harrassment of the ill- informed folks who claim to be experts and kn ow everything about Global Warming. The earth get warmer and the earth gets colder, regardless of what mankind does.
The CO2 produced by man is less than 3% of the total CO2 in the atmossphere.

I and many other 'skeptics' are finally going public with our views that Al & friends are all wrong !!

Ernie R.

Who writes this junk? And worse, who reads it? Well, I did once. And now I know better. I especially love comparing European gas mileage numbers to the USA's. Because Europe's family and travel habits are so similar to ours. And who cares what Europe does anyway? Remember that this country was started to escape the European way of life. Losers!

Chris,
your rant on GW is over the top, stick with what you know, the verdict on GW is still out.

A hundred barrels per day(bpd)of oil from 10,000 feet used to be a respectable "producer."

Now the Bakken wells are routinely producing over a thousand bpd.
Thunder Horse is projected to produce TWO HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND bpd by 2010 from 29,000 feet.

Doesn't the availability of the projected rates AND ALL THE ADDTIONAL STRATA available AROUND THE WORLD down to 29,000 feet demand a new look at the "peak oil" hypothesis?

I would appreciate a response!

I for one, as well as many scientists do not agree with this so called Global warming scare. Weather has run in cycles for hundreds of years, & now we are in a warming cycle, The next, we may be freezing our asses off.Our people in congress, don't have a clue about anything. Yhey also pick on the auto industry, but let others nuy & sell credits, & keep polluting. They also won't let drilling go on, but keep depending on foriegn oil.Democrats are idiots.

I'm delighted to see such a clear and forceful exposition of our energy problems, and of the urgent need for a drastic turnaround, one now being pursued by the Obama administration. It is a sad commentary on the intelligence of the U.S. public that it has taken a precipitous decline in our economy to call their attention to a need for change of policies!

The new administration is keeping part of it's campaign promise at least and that is "Change". $825 billion worth of change. Most of it to build out the United States Socialist Republic of America. There appears to be very little in plans put forth that will actually stimulate the economy. Seems like the best idea is GOLD with the printing presses humming night and day.

I VERY strongly support your comments about making things work rather than the legislative and congressional "idiocy." (I am a Califonian currently in Florida and the same kind of greed also hits here on various subjects.)

Ref you article on how you think - ref to oil prices, linked in this article, you mention the proce of oil varies without a correlation to fundamentals. I beg to differ and let me explain why. Other fundamentals are in play. the country and other countries are definitely in much less of a driving mood and spending money on fuel mood. Not only are people being laid off so they do not drive to and from work each day, sometimes for 30-60-90 minutes each way, but with increasingly fewer purchases of big ticket items, and of almost all new items, there is less fuel consumed by manufacturers and ship, rail and truck shipping companies. There are fewer trips to the malls, fewer vacations, and fewer business flights, with a steady movement to telecommunications instead. (I speak w/video feee on skype regularly.) And with fewer places of busines soperating, including automobile manufacturing plants, there is less heating and cooling from oil as well.

Geopolitically, the industrial nations are fed up with the blackmail from the oil producing nations, even when the leaders know the arrangements the US and other countries made with their leaders to finance their economies in return. Even the sentiment about Israel is getting more positive versus how it was so soppy oriented to the poor terrorists. And of course there is the budding individual desire to use personal solar and wind power as well as the national presidential emphasis on these and other sources of oil. And most Americans do not know we import perhaps 40% of our oil from Canada now, and with the US new fields, the price will definitely come down much further.

So demand is definitely at a lower cost level on the intersection of the supply curve.

Another fundamental is the general phase of the inflation, disinflation and deflation cycle that occurs in major amounts every 80 or so years, and especially even every 280 years or so, and in shorter time frames in fewre years cycles. It is more fundamental than any supply and demand factors. It has to do with the amount of money and credit available and the trend of a manufacturing and/or consumer society to nuild things they really need to have to do what they really want to do. We are in the obvious phase of this transformation right now. Deflation is the major trend for now until almost everything is priced perhaps at 10% of what it was a few years ago.

If anyone doesn't believe me, I suggest looking at the stock prices of GM and so forth, the closing of plants by Toyota because not enough people want to buy cars at current prices (I have a working car, that looks nice and feels good - why do I need another one? And my big screen TV is fine at 30 inches - I don't really need one at 54 inches.) Same thing happened with computers a few years ago after the Y2K revamping.

Since the demand curve is dropping way down, the supply curve has to drop to its level.

What turns this around for employment is definitely new jobs where people want to but things - like non polluting power generation and more fresh water, more fish back in the oceans, and easier and faster ways of getting things done.

When new supplies meet the new needs of consumers to get new things done, then the deflation will have done its job - and oil is supposed to get down to $10/bbl to help do it. Then houses will be affordabkle again because landlords and banks will not have to spend so much to get their things done and there will be fewer banks as well. Do we really need three banks on a corner, and without a lot of people who qualify to pay back loans, the answer is yes.

Sorry for rambling. But I have wanted to say this to someone for a number of years.

In the 1970's, the environmentalists were just as hysterical about global cooling as they are now about global warming. Then, just as now, anyone who questioned them was castigated as a know-nothing idiot. The environmentalists have no credibility, but they remain incredibly arrogant.

very biased, terrible

Your article did not make any mention of nuclear energy. Green nuclear power is the only practical solution to simultaneously (1) avoid dependence on foreign oil and gas, (2) overcome future oil and gas depletion, and (3) ameliorate global warming. Only two prime energy sources, coal and uranium, can affordably deliver terawatts of "mother" electricity to: (a) feed heavy industry, i.e. manufacture of automobiles, ships, airplanes, bridges, etc; (b) power vast fleets of future electric plug-in autos; and (c) produce enormous quantities of portable synfuels (hydrogen and ammonia) and biofuels to replace oil. However coal worsens global warming and should be preserved as raw material to make plastics and other organics when oil and gas are gone. In spite of many millions of dollars spent by hungry researchers, underground sequestration of gaseous carbon dioxide produced by coal-burning power plants is not economical or practical for thousands of generating stations worldwide. This leaves uranium as the only "big-mama" green energy source, an "inconvenient truth". That is, there is only one economic engineers-certified solution to overcome impending worldwide energy shortages. This is introduction of fast-breeder power reactors that burn up all available uranium and thorium to give the whole world 3000 years of all the electricity and heat it needs.

Popular solar and wind energy are useful for small-quantity power generation in select locations. In future energy mixes they may contribute as much as 15% of all electricity generation. But at terawatt levels, immense areas of land or sea would be needed, requiring enormous maintenance operations, spoiling scenic land- or sea-scapes, and destroying local ecosystems - an absolute nightmare for naturalists. As scientifically documented in "The Nuclear Imperative - A Critical Look at the Approaching Energy Crisis" (ISBN 1-4020-4930-7), by the year 2050 when petroleum fuels are basically exhausted, only uranium and thorium can affordably sustain global energy needs for some 3000 years, using proven fuel reprocessing and advanced fast reactor technology. A serious in-depth analysis of our future energy shortage by accredited professional engineers (not by anti-nuclear self-inflated philosophers) reveals that nuclear power will be essential to rescue our children from a future economic catastrophe. For the USA, 500 additional nuclear reactors are required, built on 9000 acres (@ $1.5 trillion), compared to 1,500,000 windmills with storage batteries on 6,000,000 windy acres (@ $4.5 trillion). Ten times these numbers are needed for the entire world. (Costs are in 2005 dollars; for later years, all costs must be multiplied by the dollar inflation factor).

Because it takes a decade to design, license, and build a reactor, action must be taken immediately to prevent a worldwide depression by 2030 when oil begins to run out. Contrary to false propaganda by anti-nuclear groups, the cost of electricity at terawatt levels is three times more expensive than for wind or solar than for nuclear. Solar and wind power generation requires expensive energy storage systems (batteries, etc) when there is no sunshine or wind. Also many miles of access roads for maintenance and repair are needed to keep blades or solar panels clean from bird droppings, dead birds, sand erosion, and storm damage, and to periodically replace electrodes on storage batteries. Aficionados of renewables usually quote peak windmill or solar station capacities, neglecting to multiply their numbers by a factor of four to account for a year-averaged availability of only 25% of peak wind or sunshine. Reactors run continuously all year at 90% capacity. Should a country limit itself to solar and wind energy, it is guaranteed to become impoverished and dependent on portable synfuels imported from other countries (future OPECs --> OSECs), who expanded their nuclear power generation before oil fields were depleted.

Energy consumption for transportation is between 35% and 40% of all energy usage in the world. On the assumption we stop drilling when it costs a gallon of oil to retrieve a gallon, one finds we will run out by 2040/2050, even with exploitation of all the tar-sand fields in the world. There is only so much volume in the 10 km deep surface shell that circumscribes our earth where decayed plants and animals (mixed with lots of sand and river run-off mud) were compressed into oil over a period of 300 million years. We are burning all that up in two centuries. With an increasing world population and with Asia and Africa wanting more of the oil, optimistic estimates show it will all be gone by 2050. While in the next fifteen years, oil and gas may remain major sources of portable chemical energy for aircraft and transport vehicles, beyond 2030 the world can only survive if synthetic fuels are produced on an enormous scale.

Of course nuclear energy extracted from uranium or thorium can not be used directly as a portable fuel to move long-haul transport vehicles (airplanes, trucks, etc). But its heat or turbine-generated electricity can be converted into portable bio-fuels and other synfuels (synthetic fuels) with reasonable efficiency. In bio-fuel production, nuclear electricity can empower farms and the extraction/distillation operations to obtain alcohols or bio-diesels from vegetation. Without input of (nuclear) electricity, bio-fuel farming would be unsustainable since energy needed for cultivation, harvesting, and extraction exceeds the energy stored in combustible plant chemicals. Nuclear-assisted farmed bio-fuels have other limitations however. They can at most replace about 20% of today's petroleum fuels because biofuel farming is limited by available arable land; man also needs to grow food to survive. The other 80% of oil-replacement must come from hydrogen and ammonia synfuels which can empower combustion engines as well as (future) fuel-cells. Hydrogen can be affordably produced by electrolysis (or chemical dissociation) of water into hydrogen and oxygen. But hydrogen has the fundamental problem of being very difficult to compact into a reasonably-sized fuel tank. So ammonia (called "second" hydrogen by some) is now favored, because it can be stored at very moderate pressure in normal-size fuel tanks used today for a comparable driving range. Ammonia is produced by compression of hydrogen with nitrogen (from the air) via the well-developed Haber-Bosch process. This is a less expensive way of storing hydrogen than liquifying it. Ammonia can fuel combustion engines (already commercially available) and solid-oxide fuel-cells (future), and is less dangerous than gasoline in vehicle collisions. Engine exhausts are water vapor and nitrogen (air) again from which ammonia was synthesized with nuclear "mother" energy.

Modern nuclear power plants are absolutely safe. Because of the negative "coefficient of reactivity", reactor fuel elements only melt (an explosion is not possible) during a maximum credible accident in which the emergency core cooling system totally fails. This was "experimentally" proven in the Three-Mile-Island (TMI) accident. A negative coefficient of reactivity means that neutron multiplication is automatically stopped when the temperature in the reactor gets too high. The Russian Chernobyl reactor, which took the lives of 57 people, had a positive coefficient of reactivity because it used graphite as moderator. Such a design for nuclear power plants is now prohibited in all countries. Furthermore the Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel, as is the law in all Western countries and now worldwide. The assertion that perhaps thousands of people could still die from radioactive fallout around Chernobyl is nonsense. Of the 60,000 inhabitants of Pripyat who had been exposed to fallout, about 9,000 will die at an advanced age of cancer because worldwide 15% of all people ultimately die from cancer. To ascribe those 9,000 deaths to Chernobyl's fallout is equally ridiculous as claiming that such a death toll is due to drinking coffee because 15% of all people drink coffee. Security precautions and containment measures for today's nuclear power plants do reckon with the possibility that terrorists might crash a large airplane or bomb on a reactor. Even if aerial obstructions (e.g. balloons) or underground construction can not prevent penetration of the large dome-shaped containment vessel, the reactor core vessel is designed to remain mostly intact. It can further be inundated with neutron-absorbing borated water which instantly suppresses all uranium fission in case of an accident.

A worn-out anti-nuclear lament is "what do we do with all the long-lived radioactive nuclear waste". The volume of waste amounts to one aspirin tablet per year per person using nuclear electricity, compared to tons of air pollutants and globe-warming gaseous CO2 emitted by coal or fossil-fuel combustion. Nuclear waste can be easily stored and safely transported, as the US nuclear navy has done for half a century. Contrary to allegations that uranium and plutonium in spent fuel elements pose a problem because of million-year half-lives, they are separated from fission products by reprocessing and burnt as fuel in future fast-breeder reactors. They will not be dumped. This reduces 50 tons of spent fuel per reactor per year to 0.8 tons of fission products (with shorter decay lives), taking centuries instead of decades to fill the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada. The notion that long radioactive lifetimes are undesirable is also erroneous. The longer the decay lifetime, the less the radiation emitted per gram of radio-isotope. Most elements that make up our bodies (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc) have infinitely long decay lifetimes. All humans are "hot" because everyone has radioactive potassium-40 (K-40; 0.012% abundance) in his body, which continuously emits beta particles with a half-life of one billion years! Man successfully evolved in this environment, and there are even indications that low levels of radiation benefit health (called hormesis). The hue and cry about possible terrorism and "dirty bombs" is also highly exaggerated. By reasoning of anti-nuclear activists, we should stop flying 707 jets because they can be used as weapons to kill thousands of people.

Energy is man's third most important need after water and food. Those who hinder expansion of nuclear power will be viewed as irresponsible neo-luddites by future generations and must be held accountable. Any further delay of a committed worldwide nuclear energy program will cause certain impoverishment and deaths of many people by 2050. Without large-scale synfuel production with help from greatly expanded nuclear power, desert cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix will become ghost-towns. Originally the US had planned to have 200 to 300 reactors (@ 1 GWe each) by the year 2000, but instead there are only 104 today. After the Three-Mile-Island (TMI) reactor meltdown in 1979 in the US (with 0 casualties) and Russia's Chernobyl accident in 1986 (with 57 fatalities), public hysteria fanned by fear-mongering antinuclear activists caused cancellations and moratoria on construction of new nuclear plants. While the USA was once the leader, most US businesses with reactor manufacturing know-how closed. Instead France, Russia, Japan, South-Korea, India, and China are now in charge. Zealous anti-nuclear lobbyists and a mal-informed government have created the pending energy crisis. We are entering a war-like energy-deprivation period as serious as WW-II or Al-Qaida. Strong Manhattan-project-like leadership is now needed to reverse the short-sightedness and follies of prior administrations.

Jeff W. Eerkens, PhD
Adjunct Research Professor,
Nuclear Science & Eng'ng Institute
University of Missouri, Columbia

What do any of you think of this theory that global warming is not so directly effected by co2 concentrations but by fluctuations in radiation and by going through the "arms of the spiral galaxy we are part of" causes changes in water droplets in our atmosphere which either creates lesser or more reflectivity of our suns rays therefore either heating or cooling or planet moreor less!!

The car makers have to make what people want ot buy. Once gov. starts telling us what to buy than it wont stop. Banks, homes, mortgages... Oh I forgot. They do now.... Know wonder we are F .....

There is money to be made in "change", but not giving $5B to ACORN, Obey's son, and the rest of this porcine debt(stimulus) and political pay back. Our greatest security and fiscal need is to be independent of the mostly Islamic or Socialist states that supply oil that keeps us productive. At the moment, we are screwed, so why don't we use all available petroleum resources until the technology is capable of sustaining the American way of life? The entire TARP/debt stimulus program is a disaster, if these idiots can't run a business-it should fail. Do you really want Pelosi-Reid-Frank et al running the economy? From Jimmy Carter forward, the demi-crats have created the fiscal mess of today. Socialism has never worked and Jimmy H. Obama's version will not either. Business will fail and crimminals should go to jail(includes most of Congress); and the government should not run the economy. Your view point shows lack of scientific and business knowlege and a left wing approach to life. I will use it to make money and try to keep demi-crats from stealing it.
JT

Dear Chris,
Didn't know your were/are a Californian. Sorry. TESI stands for Tank Environmental Solutions Inc. (sic) LLC. I've been in the environmental business since 1990 and the E&P business since 1966. The E&P business is cleaner, has fewer crooks, is more scientific and dwarfs the environmental business in productivity. Been there done that.
This planet has been warming and cooling for a variety of reasons as long as it's been here, and will continue to do so weather we are here or not. This latest go around is anthropomorphic so the various "gumints" around the globe can find villians, and produce regulations to control them. If global warming has nothing to do or minimal to do with our actions, it merely shows the "gumint" can't control it and the villians are myths. Now we can't have that can we?

YVT RJS

OK, the Obama-kissing has finally turned me off completely. You have revealed yourself to be a loony California tree-hugging liberal. Screw driving around in European clown cars. California is $45B in the red and all they have to focus on is driving the auto manufacturers into the ground. WRITING LAWS DOESN'T MAKE IT SO! You people are crazy. Get me outta here.

Chris - i've enjoyed reading your brass tacks approach to our energy isuues. Thanks for pointing out Obama's quote on monday.
"At a time of such great challenge for America, no single issue is as fundamental to our future as energy,"

I totally agree and am thrilled that the president is seeing the issue and speaking about the challenges and the opportunities in addressing our energy issue.

An I am with you. Fix energy and you'll help a bunch on the critical fronts of economic opportunity, climate change and foreign policy.
If we produced all of our own energy we would likely be avoiding future wars, which under current conditions, would be fought over oil.
Keep up the good work!

Greg Gibbons
Louisville, KY

It sounds like MSNBC wrote this article. While I wish the President well and pray for him (but not to him), it appears you have moved Obama from canonization to demigod.

Can anyone tell me why we are ignoring natural gas for motor fuel? Natural gas is abundant,cheap and all American,. The technology for it has been around and in use for 20 years.