A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [140]
Fossil fuels are great fuels. They are very energy-dense for their size and weight. You can’t eat them, so their use as fuel doesn’t compete with people’s needs for food or farmland. (If the entire U.S. corn crop went to make ethanol, it would replace only 15 percent of America’s gasoline usage.) Clean renewables have drawbacks. A coal plant can keep producing energy whether or not the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. Wind is clean, but many people object to the sight of turbines (they should see how the oil rigs dominate the view in the Gulf), to their sound, or to the fact that they kill birds and bats. Large-scale solar projects need a lot of land.
But fossil fuels have drawbacks, too. One, they’re not eternal and won’t last forever. Their production is likely to peak in a few decades. Two, in the process of getting them, workers die and dictators thrive. Three, they’re hurting the world’s life-support capacity.
It is hard to imagine how solar power or wind or algae could power all of civilization. But not so very long ago, the present scale and difficulty of coal mining, oil drilling, and civilization itself—for that matter—was impossible to envision. Even though fossil fuels elicited giddy attraction, ramping them up to dominance took the better part of a century. No matter how good a fuel is, it takes time to create the technology to produce it, the infrastructure to transport it, and the consumer demand for it.
We have to do something. The Gulf of Mexico accounts for almost a third of America’s oil production and most new discoveries. Most of the world’s land has been sucked dry, especially in the United States. And elsewhere, it’s being put out of reach by autocratic, self-protecting governments.
Many people say—and they have a point—that if Americans do not want to hand even more money and clout to the likes of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela (I certainly don’t), we should drill more at home. I would add: and America should harness all our domestic sources of energy. We should get on an emergency war-footing crash program for creating the jobs and building the infrastructure to surpass China and northern Europe’s renewable-energy race, summon the determination to lead the world into the eternal-energy economy, and emerge again as the greatest country on Earth. You’ll hear me say this again, because, really, that’s the Big Picture here.
In America, there hadn’t been a big offshore oil well leak in forty years. Underwater pipeline leaks declined from an average of 2.5 million gallons per year in the early 1980s to just 12,000 gallons a year in the early ’00s, according to the Congressional Research Service. The National Research Council estimates that offshore drilling, tankers, and pipelines account for 5 percent of the oil that gets into in U.S. waters, while shipping accounts for 33 percent, and 62 percent comes from natural seeps (natural seeps send perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 barrels of oil into the northern Gulf daily, though estimates vary a lot).
This leads us to a question. What’s the worst part of America’s oil addiction: funding foreign dictators, warming the air and acidifying the seas, or drilling holes? Perhaps we should not, after all, keep America’s waters closed to our thirst for oil. Perhaps we should just drink a wider variety of energies that are better for us, better for everything. Americans pay a fraction of the full cost of a gallon of gasoline, if you count the costs of pollution and wars to maintain access. Not at the pump, anyway.
The best way to respond to the Gulf disaster? Not washing oil off birds, picking up turtles, spraying dispersants, or