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Climate change is the reality we are living in. It is not going away; it has been clearly established as a fact, IOMCO — or immediately obvious to the most casual observer. The weather is simply becoming more extreme. More tornados, more flooding, more drought, stronger hurricanes and other extreme weather events are only the tip of the iceberg. Climate change is not something that you can change overnight.
It has taken a few hundred years for man to have the negative impact that it has on the climate; even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels tomorrow, it would take hundreds more to reverse the trend.
We hit the big time lottery when we discovered oil and gas. It was like we stumbled upon a treasure chest with millions of years of stored energy and just like some lottery winners, we became mesmerized by the wealth and spent it without even thinking of the future. Many scientists have agreed that the world has probably reached “peak oil.” This means that we have extracted and burned the easy 50% of the world’s supply of fossil fuels.
The remaining 50% will be harder to get, more expensive in the process, and perhaps spurning significant challenges to both the environment and political stability as nations compete for this precious resource. We have always depended upon discovering new sources of oil when the old ones were depleted but we are running out of new sources and some are much more complicated.
Take fracking for example. Our current oil and gas supplies are coming more and more frequently as a result of fracking. This is a process of injecting water and some witches brew of chemicals into a depleted well in the hopes of creating small fractures which will allow oil, gas or other stuff to migrate to that well. This is a more expensive way of getting that second half of the oil and gas out of the ground. It is costly to the environment, costly to the consumer and there have been reports of the oil and gas from fracturing leaching into water supplies.
Additionally, there are increases in earthquake activity associated with these fractures. I have a good friend who makes his living driving trucks full of fracking fluid from well sites in Montana to some random dumping ground. He doesn’t like the work, but it is work. My point here is that future fossil fuel resources come with higher costs both to the environment and to consumers, while continuing our negative impact on climate.
The most sensible alternatives are very strict conservation of resources and renewable energy. I will not get into the debate over nuclear energy other than to say that given its financial and environmental record, I cannot see it as part of our future energy portfolio. While fossil fuels are in fact, renewable, it just takes a few million years for them to renew. On the other hand, wind, water, biomass and sun are renewable on a daily basis.
Any source of energy has its drawbacks. Other than discovering that treasure chest again, each form of energy carries a burden. Burning fossil fuels creates climate change, harms the environment in extraction and use. Wind energy requires space for turbines and some may object to the changes to the landscape or the noise. Solar energy requires land and huge arrays to generate enough meaningful power. Hydro power requires dams and impacts local environments, too. But the most benign sources of energy are renewable resources.
We must do two things if we are to impact climate change. We must reduce our dependence upon fossil fuels. We can do this by making more energy efficient vehicles, heating systems, lighting, etc. Energy conservation is the least expensive and least harmful source of energy and we have a tremendous amount of energy we can save by simply not using as much. The other is to shift the search for new sources of energy from fracking and oil shales to major support and deployment of renewable energy resources.
It is really our only choice and people have been warning us for decades about the impending implications of unrestrained fossil fuel use and the impact upon our planet. Right now, I would say we are moving way, way too slowly — baby steps are not going to even have baby impact on climate change.
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