This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 18, 2009 - Oddly enough, those “in charge” in the world have a chronic inability to consider the true cost of things, whether they be commodities or activities or programs. Among the negative and largely unnecessary consequences are that humans currently face debilitating shortages of essential commodities, financial and environmental problems, and abundant world strife.
The combination of fiscal meltdown and administration change offers the United States an overdue opportunity to rethink our energy policies and related infrastructure. Useful perspective is provided by considering the price of fossil fuels, the source of most of the world’s energy. These fuels are combusted to provide heat energy, which is then transformed in ways that serve us.
A very simple way to evaluate different fossil fuels is to compare their market price per unit of energy supplied. Here’s a surprise, at the current price of $45 per barrel, oil costs $7.50 per MBTU (million BTUs), while natural gas costs $4.97 per MBTU. Powder River coal, the low sulfur coal that is the primary fuel for electrical power plants in Missouri, currently costs $13 per short ton, which translates to $0.74 per MBTU.
Incredible - the coal we use to generate electricity costs 10 times less than oil, per unit of energy released, and the supplies are in our own country. Moreover, we can, over time, transform electrical generation from coal to non-polluting, renewable sources such as wind and solar.
This raises several questions. Why haven’t we been using electric cars and trains all along? Has it been better for us to manufacture gas hogs that nobody outside of the United States wants to buy, each supplied with its own pollution control unit?
Was it to our national benefit to sustain a trade deficit of $300 million to $1 billion every day, just for crude oil, and to do this for decades, reliably supplying so many unfriendly nations with incredible fortunes? Did this approach save our jobs, strengthen our retirement accounts, improve the air in our cities, feed the poor or stabilize the world? It isn’t as if we did not have decades of warning that this was a bad path. I have grown weary of the jargon that our nation is addicted to oil. It would be far more accurate to state that the federal government has failed to recognize realities.
To understand how that happened, one would do well to look at campaign contributions, revolving-door lobbying and inertia. There is no logical reason for the federal government to support the energy path we've gone down.
Looking ahead, the American people should demand that Congress change direction and push the auto companies, which are asking for federal help, to go full out toward developing and marketing electric cars. At the same time, we could provide jobs and secure our future by improving and expanding our power transmission infrastructure and our public transportation systems.
Were electrical generation systems thoughtfully transformed in ways that use domestic resources, especially those that are clean and renewable, we would all come out ahead in the long run.
Robert Criss is a professor in the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University.