Yeah, it’s not as if there’s piles of sugar out there that could be used if, you know, some hypothetical lobby – let’s call it the corn lobby here, to protect the innocent – weren’t spending millions of dollars keeping tariffs ridiculously high.
There’s sugar in other nations - not the United States - and the big, evil corn lobby’s dollars have very little to do with the fact that the United States is a better climate for growing corn than sugar cane. Beets, maybe. Cane, not so much. That means that sugar certainly isn’t our path to energy independence, setting all technological concerns and efficiency considerations aside. Regardless, you’re going to have a hard time establishing that we can meet even our current petrochemical demand with cane sugar, let alone projected future increases in demand as development in the third world continues.
I’m sorry, perhaps I missed where producing plastic had anything to do with energy independence?
Unless the petroleum-derived alternatives were cheaper to make, which for most of the past 60 years or so, they have been. That equation is changing, though, with the skyrocketing price of oil. The main reason industry lags behind is that there are huge sunk costs in a manufacturing infrastructure based on using petroleum. But make no mistake: These changes are coming. They don’t have to be mandated by government or championed by environmentalists, because rising oil costs will push industry to alternative materials like rising water pushes rats off a sinking ship. So enjoy your ABS Legos while Lego still makes them, because I can pretty much guarantee that their days are numbered.
Right, and most of those plastic products you mentioned are imported from other nations as well so I’m not really sure what your point is here. So we get our plastic widgets from Brazil instead of China, so what?
My point is that one of the goals of increasing drilling is decreasing resource dependence on foreign nations. Transforming the national petrochemical industry to operate on sugar does not improve the situation at all, because the United States would not be able to generate enough of its own sugar to solve that issue.
So how much of the oil that is pumped out of the ground is turned into plastics anyway? Compared to what we turn into energy that is.
Well, it’s a manufacturing process that not only consumes energy, but also the material we extract energy from as an ingredient. While certainly not a particularly central point it’s certainly relevant.
I don’t understand why drilling in ANWR would have displaced tons of people. Let’s say I want to drill all the oil that is sitting under Ohio. I don’t have to make everyone move out. They have sideways drilling now. Nobody has to move at all. I just need to find the places where people aren’t living and put an oil rig there. Obviously, accidents with oil can cause problems, but we do everything we can to avoid those. After all, we want the oil for use, not to spread all over fish and deer and stuff.
Why would we have to do that since we don’t make most of those plastic products you mentioned domestically anyway?
You started off by framing it as an existential issue: we need oil so that we can have these things in the future. When Ben pointed out that that wasn’t true, you switched from “I won’t be able to buy Eric Cartman figures” to “The US won’t be able to produce Eric Cartman figures (that it already isn’t producing).”
Different arguments. We shouldn’t burn through all of our oil because it IS the objectively best way to produce all of those products that I’ve cataloged so far, and many, many more. Biological alternatives are ridiculously expensive in comparison, requiring a completely different infrastructure from what we have built now, and sometimes being inherently incompatible with any kind of efficient transportation or production (for instance, it is impossible to transport ethanol by pipeline because too many impurities would be introduced in the process, which means that anything that’s not produced on-site is going to need its feeds shipped as freight). If we were to run out of oil tomorrow, many, if not all, of those things would either become dramatically more expensive or cease to exist entirely, so when dealing with a limited resource (albeit one of which there is a considerably greater supply than Ben seems to think), given the fact that we already have much more immediately viable alternatives for energy generation than we do for petrochemical production, I would favor increased use of alternative energy and using whatever crude oil could be saved to continue to produce cost-efficient plastic, synthetic rubber, alcohol, and whatever other chemical goods further into the future.
A further goal of drilling more in the United States territorial area is achieving a more secure resource position and not needing to import quite so much crap, and I can assure you in no uncertain terms that all of the chemicals we’re talking about enjoy a healthy business here in the United States (action figures might be manufactured in Taiwan, but the chip plastic that gets melted down and run through the machinery is made in lots of places, including the United States). Changing the feedstocks from crude oil to various biological factors, in addition to being prohibitively expensive, would serve to make us more reliant on import of foreign feeds, making the extant problem of resource dependence that the drilling effort attempts to ameliorate worse, rather than improving things.
Brian: so what do we do when the oil runs out? Your proposal - use alternative energy so we can use petroleum for goods instead of fuel - prolongs how long the world supply of oil lasts and may be acceptable in the short-to-mid-term. But eventually the oil wells still run dry, since I’m pretty sure we’d still be consuming it a lot faster than Mother Earth can produce it. Perhaps you take it as a given that we would research more cost-effective renewable alternatives to petroleum-based plastics etc. in the meantime, but if so I didn’t notice you mentioning it.
Usually “objectively best way to produce something” is called “price.” If the price is wrong, say, due to unpriced externalities from pollution or global warming or long-term myopic planning about a resource that may work out, you figure out a way to change the market structure to get the price right.
Additionally, I’d point out that you can’t produce more plastic by “not burning through our oil.” It’s not like you can convert a barrel of crude oil into either gasoline or plastics. The refining process breaks it down into a number of components, each used to produce different things. Gasoline is made from octane, plastics like polyethylene are made from ethane. Both are products of the refining process (along with a bunch of other stuff). You can’t use it all the byproducts of refining to make plastic, any more than you can use all the meat from a pig to make bacon. There’s only so much bacon in a pig. The raw materials for plastics are a very small percentage of the materials that you get by refining oil, AFAIK.
I’d be willing to bet that if we worked the true cost of all of the unpriced externalities into the price of things at a global level then the world economy collapses because since at least the industrial revolution (probably earlier) we’ve been doing the ecological equivalent of putting everything on our tab. You do it at a national level and the country gets outcompeted by nations that don’t care about that stuff and the economy collapses even worse (and there’s probably a revolution that repeals that stuff in pretty short order as well).
Fossil fuel supples, ecological resistance to toxin levels, and atmospheric resistance to emissions are all finite and slapping the true price of all of these things on them would absolutely destroy the worlds ability to provide for itself at the current population and technology levels.
It’s a sad state of affairs when all I really want is enough people in power to recognize the problems at hand and start slapping stopgap measures in place (i.e. a glacially slow move towards sustainable energy and a political ideology that advocates energy independence and hence massively decreased fossil fuel consumption more in line with national reserves) while throwing appropriately massive amounts of money at relevant research.
Well any time you massively change prices in the short run you’re going to get chaos. It’s not like digging metals out of the ground has to be really really polluting to be cheap.
It has to be “really really polluting” to be competitive with people who do it the “really really polluting” way.
For reference about how ignoring externalities (both ecological and social) gives you a competitive edge see China’s growing industrial pwnstick.
Sure, but that’s just a price competition thing with China. You can solve that by taxing the hell out of them their polluting imports.
Not that I expect any of this to ever happen, but hey.
Both the US and the EU have basically outsourced their pollution to China. Viva la globalism!
Ok, I was using the info from Wiki, but I don’t think matters if the number is 4 billion, 7.7 billion 10 billion or 16 billion.
You are correct it isn’t a lot in comparison to the total US energy consumption. It is huge compared to all the alternative energy project we are currently talking and fighting about. If we extract the oil from ANWR over 25 years, that is the equivalent of not building 1,000 Cape Wind Project off Nantucket. We may very well need to do both but trying to get 1,000 offshore wind projects built in this country is going to a political nightmare.
If the argument against ANWR is “it doesn’t really provide much energy” than virtually every project smaller than 3 Gorges-like Hydro plants or a multi-GigaWatt Nuclear Plants, will be even more vulnerable to this argument.