Could Ending Fossil Fuels Actually Hurt The Environment?

I’m skeptical of studies like this, just as I am with pro-climate cult ones. I’ve said many times that I am not a big fan of fossil fuels, which do damage the environment as pollutants, air, sea, and land. That said, a big thing to remember is that the environment is different from the climate scam.

Going black, not green: Curbing US oil, gas production would hurt the environment, report finds

Environmentalists seeking to halt U.S. oil and gas production in the name of combating climate change are undermining their own agenda and risking greater damage to the planet, according to a new report.

The Institute for Energy Research (IER) released a paper showing that the U.S. is the most environmentally friendly major energy producer and arguing that, like it or not, because petroleum products are here to stay, limiting U.S. production would have a devastating effect on the environment.

There have been vast strides over the past 50+ years in making fossil fuels cleaner (though, I don’t buy the clean coal thing). I noticed a lot of pollution from motors in the waterways back during the days of growing up at the beach, and this has gotten much better over the years.

A major hurdle for the Brandon administration, according to IER, is that global efforts to curb oil and gas production haven’t lessened the world’s reliance on fossil fuels for energy — petroleum products are entrenched in modern society to such a degree that fossil fuels and modernity have become all but inseparable.

“Nearly every facet of modern developed economies requires petroleum products and natural gas to function and provide the comfortable lifestyles that citizens of developed countries have come to expect,” the report states. “These resources are necessary for agriculture, heavy industry, transportation by all modes — road, rail, air, or ship — and a great number of the products that we take for granted. They’re ingrained in almost everything.”

As a result, the report continues, efforts to reduce or eliminate oil and gas production in developed countries will simply shift production to other countries in order to meet global demand that’s not going away.

In other words, if the U.S., the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas, reduced its production significantly, other energy producers — such as China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, among others — would likely pick up the slack, thereby not leading to any drop in global fossil fuel use.

One day the Earth will be able to transition away from most use of fossil fuels for energy and transportation, but, good grief, do the climate cultists and extreme enviros realize how much is made with fossil fuels? This site provides a partial list of 144 of about 6,000 products. Someone is going to produce it, and a lot of these nations will be a lot less careful about being as environmentally responsible as possible.

Oh, and it would probably skyrocket the cost of all the goods.

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16 Responses to “Could Ending Fossil Fuels Actually Hurt The Environment?”

  1. Facts Matter says:

    It is delusional to think we can transition to Green energy in 10-20 years. Here is why:

    Not that the people who want it to be done are delusional but rather believing in the ability of the world to accomplish this feat is delusional.

    IEA or International Energy Agency (Mission
    The IEA is committed to shaping a secure and sustainable energy future for all)

    Reports that so far the world is 3 percent green at a cost of 15 trillion dollars directly and 15 trillion indirectly. Extrapolating this out of course shows that to attain even 10 percent will cost another 60 trillion dollars and to go to 100 percent might well cost on the order of 1000 trillion dollars.

    Before an EV hits the street it already cost 25-30 BBL’s of oil/gas and this will not change anytime soon. Most of the things we make come from Oil/gas/petroleum in order to make them. Not the energy but the actual Oil or gas is used as an ingredient to make things that are needed by an electric car, windmill and solar panel.

    Coming up with 1000 trillion dollars in the next 20 years is Delusional thinking. Again the people are not themselves delusional. Only their ambitions.

    All of this of course will be borne by the richest 35-40 countries potentially bankrupting them beyond their means to pay these amounts. Norway on the other hand has accomplished 80 percent Green energy and 80 percent of all new cars are EV’s. Norway is exponentially richer than the USA per capita while it still SELLS OIL to the open market. Removing its oil sales it comes down to earth and enters the world as a middle-of-the-pack nation.

    Secondly and even more importantly the US government reports that transitioning to green will require an increase in MINERAL PRODUCTION by 4000 to 7000 percent the world over. Yes that is correct. 4000 to 7000 percent increase in mineral production to go 100 percent green and then we must keep strip mining the earth to continue to make replacement parts for these green energy devices.

    This is most of the cost that has been associated with the cost of just going 3 percent green so far. That will expand exponentially if the world becomes serious while crushing fossil fuels in the process.

    The solution is simple. Stop with the fear-mongering. Allow fossil fuels to continue to be used as we slowly transition from Liquid energy to nonliquid energy. A term the IEA uses.

    This has been my position for a long time. I do not care who wins the power/energy battle as long as we continue to feed the people and the transition is as painless as possible.

    You cannot transition the world to green in these stupidly short time frames. The money is not there, the resources are not there and the ability to do this is not there and it never will be.

    In 20 years. or 30 years or 40 years. Not possible. By 2100 it is possible so stop with the lies that we are at a tipping point and were all going to die. Just stop it!

    I understand we are on the verge of making breakthroughs with fusion energy. Building 1000 fusion energy plants around the world will take 40-50 years if we started today. And by the way. How do you build a fusion energy plant? Are there enough people knowledgeable enough to build 1000 or even 100 of these at the same time? No there is not.

    The idea that we can transition to green energy in 10-20 years is delusional from simply an infrastructure standpoint. Period.

  2. Elwood P. Dowd says:

    Mr Teach is wise to question the motives of the Institute for Energy Research (IER) founded by Charles Koch (Koch Industries), funded by the oil and gas industry and headed by the former director of public policy analysis for Enron.

    Teach:

    do the climate cultists and extreme enviros realize how much is made with fossil fuels?

    Nice try. The use of fossil fuels as components to manufacture plastics, pharmaceuticals, lubricants, fertilizer and inks etc are miniscule compared to their use as fuels and electricity generation.

    It makes no sense to eliminate all use of fossil fuels. The objective is to cut the use significantly; to transition to renewable sources for the biggest offenders.

    • Dana says:

      The estimable Mr Dowd wrote:

      It makes no sense to eliminate all use of fossil fuels. The objective is to cut the use significantly; to transition to renewable sources for the biggest offenders.

      Portland cement for use in concrete is produced in a rotary kiln, in which the components are heated to the 2500º to 2650º F range, something only achieved by natural gas with high oxygen injection. Concrete is the most versatile building material we have, and if we eliminate fossil fuel availability for cement production, American workers will lose jobs, but, not to worry, foreign companies and workers will make more as we have to import cement from Columbia and Venezuela and Greece.

      • Elwood P. Dowd says:

        As we stated, transportation and electricity production are by far the largest sources of global CO2 emissions. Cement production accounts for about 8%. Recall that Mr Teach whines about “elites” flying in airplanes but never about concrete building materials! Anyway, it’s highly unlikely that with our climbing population and the versatility and economic value of cement that we’ll drop its production.

        Can efficiencies be made as cement production increases? Probably.

        If humankind can greatly reduce CO2 emissions from transportation, electricity generation, agriculture and home use we can make all the cement we want!

        These are not all or nothing situations.

        • drowningpuppies says:

          Rimjob: These are not all or nothing situations.

          Unlike buying stock in Galera.

          #Bidenflation>6.5%
          #Galera@1.76
          Bwaha! Lolgf https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_cool.gif

        • L'Roy White says:

          If humankind can greatly reduce CO2 emissions from transportation, electricity generation, agriculture and home use we can make all the cement we want!

          IF, that big little word. But it is interesting how you guys always come back to reducing a non lethal gas by squeezing the basic needs of modern life: transportation, electricity, food and shelter. Hell, if you could just take al the guns you’d have a utopia just like all the other communist countries did. And you call yourselves progressives. How can a nation or people at all progress without affordable food, housing, transportation and power?

          Our ancestors weren’t villains. Don’t apologize. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6dc597107d04579fcb184651625fab8601233fa698e482f7840b548fa5780d76.jpg?w=600&h=487

    • James Lewis says:

      Sear Elwood:

      Hmmmmm

      “Scientists are scrambling to explain why the continent of Antarctica has shown Net Zero warming for the last seven decades and almost certainly much longer. The lack of warming over a significant portion of the Earth undermines the unproven hypothesis that the carbon dioxide humans add to the atmosphere is the main determinant of global climate.

      snip

      “A recent paper from two climate scientists (Singh and Polvani) accepts that Antarctica has not warmed in the last seven decades, despite an increase in the atmospheric greenhouse gases”

      Makes you wonder.

      https://dailysceptic.org/

      • Elwood P. Dowd says:

        Here’s the abstract from Singh and Polvani 2020. One can read the entire paper.

        They ran computer models comparing low and high topography models of Antarctica and concluded that the mountainous nature of the continental ice sheets keeps Antarctica cooler than the rest of the globe, even in the face of global warming. Is that what you wanted to discuss?

        Low Antarctic continental climate sensitivity due to high
        ice sheet orography

        Hansi A. Singh and Lorenzo M. Polvani

        The Antarctic continent has not warmed in the last seven decades, despite a monotonic increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. In this paper, we investigate whether the high orography of the Antarctic ice sheet (AIS) has helped delay warming over the continent. To that end, we contrast the Antarctic climate response to CO2-doubling with present-day orography to the response with a flattened AIS. To corroborate our findings, we perform this exercise with two different climate models. We find that, with a flattened AIS, CO2-doubling induces more latent heat transport toward the Antarctic continent, greater moisture convergence over the continent and, as a result, more surface-amplified condensational heating. Greater moisture convergence over the continent is made possible by flattening of moist isentropic surfaces, which decreases humidity gradients along the trajectories on which extratropical poleward moisture transport predominantly occurs, thereby enabling more moisture to reach the pole. Furthermore, the polar meridional cell disappears when the AIS is flattened, permitting greater CO2-forced warm temperature advection toward the Antarctic continent. Our results suggest that the high elevation of the present AIS plays a significant role in decreasing the susceptibility of the Antarctic continent to CO2-forced warming.

        npj Climate and Atmospheric Science (2020)3:39; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-020-00143-w

    • alanstorm says:

      The use of fossil fuels as components to manufacture plastics, pharmaceuticals, lubricants, fertilizer and inks etc are miniscule compared to their use as fuels and electricity generation.

      Nice try. Replacements for all these “miniscule” uses? Oh, right, “plant-based” solutions, which will take up even more agricultural land.

      Have you ever considered growing a brain? Sorry; rhetorical.

  3. alanstorm says:

    EVERYTHING hurts the environment, according to the Luddite enviroloonies.

  4. CarolAnn says:

    The objective is to cut the use significantly; to transition to renewable sources for the biggest offenders.

    It is revealing how you use the word “offenders” where you should use producers. But hey, commies will commie.

    There currently is no such thing as “renewable energy”. At least none which are cheap enough and reliable enough to power a modern nation especially one any larger than a few million people like Norway.

    EV’s will show themselves to be unreliable and even dangerous in any use other than temperate climates and short distances. Again okay for Finland but not the US. But as their usual MO the left wants a one size fits all answer (except for themselves) for a universal problem.

    The side benefit for American democommies and leftists world wide is the slavery, misery and child abuse created by EV mining. They just love to use their white privilege to grind minorities and blacks into the dirt of slavery and poverty whenever they can. Earth element mining allows them to do that worldwide and they just love it. All while preening themselves as caring and virtuous because they care about the climate (fuk the kids).

    The pedo biden has turned America into a second world shithole headed toward third world. We think he’s using the democommie mayors of Baltimore, LA, NY, Detroit and other American shitholes as a guide. They really take their communism seriously.

    Philly. dem city, dem voters, dem policy look at it!!! https://youtu.be/fVJQYRwh_3g

    • drowningpuppies says:

      It is revealing how you use the word “offenders” where you should use producers.

      Rimjob knows little about producing and a lot about offending.
      Check out his company.
      12 straight negative quarters.
      Now that’s offensive.

      #Galera
      Bwaha! Lolgfhttps://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_cool.gif

      • L.G.Brandon!, L.G.Brandon! says:

        That’s way past offensive, drowningpuppies, that’s totally incompetent if not criminal against investors.

  5. Facts Matter says:

    It is possible to stop co2 expulsion entirely in the power industry.

    It is called Carbon Sequestration. The fact that the NAZI left will not even allow it is proof enough this is about more than the production of CO2.

    They would rather strip mine the planet to oblivion than bury the co2 into caverns underground where all the coal, natural gas, and oil are at the moment anyway.

    It is expensive but would take a tiny fraction of the amount of money they seem bent on spending on green energy.

    Money that is not available.

    From the University of California BERKLEY…a radical leftist college.

    What is Carbon Sequestration?
    Carbon sequestration secures carbon dioxide to prevent it from entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The idea is to stabilize carbon in solid and dissolved forms so that it doesn’t cause the atmosphere to warm. The process shows tremendous promise for reducing the human “carbon footprint.” There are two main types of carbon sequestration: biological and geological.

    EVEN THEY ADMIT IS SHOWS PROMISE.

    • Elwood P. Dowd says:

      By all means please start carbon sequestration!

      But why bother? The reactionary right has “proven” that trace amounts of carbon dioxide is unimportant and that global warming is a commie scamplot.

      Would you want the government to mandate carbon capture on all power plants?

      Note too that burning 1 g of carbon generates 3.7 g of CO2 – that has to be “captured” by some solid sorbent stored. This is not trivial.

      So, 1 gallon of gasoline (about 6 pounds) generates about 22 lbs of CO2! How do you capture and store that out of a tailpipe?

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