From: The Caucus Blog – NYTimes.com
Senate Democrats on Tuesday abandoned all hopes of passing even a slimmed-down energy bill before they adjourn for the summer recess, saying that they did not have sufficient votes even for legislation tailored narrowly to respond to the Gulf oil spill.
Although the majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, sought to blame Republicans for sinking the energy measure, the reality is that Democrats are also divided over how to proceed on the issue and had long ago given up hope of a comprehensive bill to address climate change.
…
“Ask anyone outside of Washington, and they’ll tell you that this isn’t a Democrat or a Republican issue, it’s an American issue,” Mr. Kerry said. “It’s American troops whose lives are endangered because we’re dependent on oil companies in countries that hate us. It’s American consumers who are tired not just of prices at the pump that soar each summer, but sick and tired of our oil dependency that makes Iran $100 million richer every day that Washington fails to respond.”
h/t to Tom Nelson
GM says:
August 4, 2010 at 12:58 pm
aletho says:
August 4, 2010 at 12:45 pm
By the way folks, the science on abiotic oil IS settled unlike the global warming nonsense:
“I just went to Google Scholar and searched for oil formation and I got back hundreds of article, old and new, in direct contradiction with oil abiogenesis…….”
GM, you score more points here if you provide a couple of links to the articles that back your assertions. Many here would actually read them.
GM, this is why I was a Dem:
1. Don’t want religion (unless it is an elective class) in public schools or government. Many conservatives run on a religious plank.
2. Don’t want government in my bedroom or anywhere near my right to choose what comes, or when it comes, from my body. Many conservatives want to make abortion illegal.
3. Don’t want government telling me who I can love, how I love, or whether or not I can marry or get divorced. Many conservatives want to discriminate regarding marriage and bedroom practices.
4. Don’t want government telling me what jobs I can or cannot have if I am qualified for them, which includes the military. Many conservatives have this silly notion that females cannot aim and fire.
5. I’m not fond of corporations. Many conservatives love them and go out of their way to gain their attention.
6. And finally I believe in publicly caring for those who cannot care for themselves. A measure of a truly free society is how we collectively treat those who do not have the capacity to become productive. Many conservatives think that we can leave it all up to charity and still be a decent country to live in.
But it seems the Dems have turned into money spending greenpeace and PETA-ish activists. They have gotten away from their baseline message and now just seem bent on running up the deficit.
However, I am as distrustful of Conservatives as I now am of Democrats. To tell you the truth, I am disenchanted with the whole lot and am getting ready to go fishing.
Random research article:
http://aapgbull.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/84/5/591
Nice review on abiogenesis:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/121502173/PDFSTART
What this means is that people, like Chu, Jackson and Holdren, will be throwing cruel rulings and stone-cold policies at the American people.
They won’t give up, and now that they can’t have thier Big Tax, they’ll attempt to substitute by draconian fiat.
I say attempt.
Pamela Gray says:
August 4, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Don’t give up, Pam: That’s exactly what they are counting on.
GM,
You provide a link to an article that one must pay to read! And this is what you suppose is to convince us that your 200 year old unproven theory trumps replicable science?
Fascinating.
One wonders what drives your faith.
For those interested in abiotic oil, even GM:
http://carnegiescience.edu/news/hydrocarbons_deep_earth
http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ef9006017
http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ef9006017ttp://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ef9006017
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/14/science/14meth.html?_r=1&n=Top/News/Science/Topics/Space
The idea that oil could in fact have another origin, besides the much-touted “fossil” one isn’t that far-fetched, it seems. But, it does tend to threaten the world-view of Alarmists, who really really, just don’t want to hear about it.
rbateman 3:45,
You are absolutely correct, here’s an example:
New York City passes B2 oilheat mandate
By Erin Voegele – Aug. 3, 2010
On July 29, the New York City Council unanimously voted to pass air quality legislation that will ensure all heating oil used within the city contains biodiesel. The legislation, which expected to be signed into law within two weeks, will require the use of a B2 blend of heating oil starting in October 2012…
http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/blog/aletho-news/nyc-preparing-war-reducing-reliance-oil
GM, your link to the review on abiogenesis is behind a paywall. Your first link, while it may be of interest to geochemists, is probably wasn’t what I was looking for. I’m happy for the Chinese in finding some more oil and gas reserves and the chemical compositions and weight had me animated. It didn’t seem to add to any of the conversations. You did say it was random. 😐
aletho says:
August 4, 2010 at 4:32 pm
rbateman 3:45,
You are absolutely correct, here’s an example:
New York City passes B2 oilheat mandate
By Erin Voegele – Aug. 3, 2010
On July 29, the New York City Council unanimously voted to pass air quality legislation that will ensure all heating oil used within the city contains biodiesel. The legislation, which expected to be signed into law within two weeks, will require the use of a B2 blend of heating oil starting in October 2012…
They never cease to amaze me. Now heating fuel? Butter for popcorn was bad enough. Do the people of the city really accept every aspect of their life to be regulated? Now they can’t choose how to heat themselves? What happens when a cheaper more efficient fuel is available?
But this is the same administration that wants to shut down 30 percent of the nation’s crude oil supply with its counter-intuitive moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. If Sen. Kerry is concerned about importing foreign oil, he should tell his friend Obama that we can’t power autos by putting a windmill on top of them yet…
As bad as Bush Jr was, can anyone possibly imagine how bad things would have been with Gore or Kerry as President?
/GM,
You are a learned and intelligent individual, I will concede you that. Genetically I fear you were given some irritable genes.
But lets leave that, its a little weird.
What I need help with is the notion that price doesn’t matter. If A company can produce an oil like substance for $40 a barrel and make money, is it the notion that they are using $80 worth of material to get it? Is it the lifespan of the product that makes you angry? The idea that only a percentage is available? I don’t understand the point, and I apologize for not being at your caliber. It seems to me if it costs so much energy to get the substance they would push the cost along to me.
The Democrats will wait until 3 AM to suddenly reach a resolution and will vote this crap in. History has a way of repeating itself. Hopefully there will be more non-fools than fools voting in November. It’s like watching free people vote themselves into slavery and liking it. Oh wait, it’s not “like”, it is.
A sterling piece of evidence for abiogenic hyrdrocarbon creation is Titan, where there are lakes of oil etc. exceeding the total known “biogenic” reserves of Planet Earth.
I wonder just when Titan’s “Carboniferous” era was.
Smokey: ““[….]” is used in order to equate scientific skeptics…with Holocaust [….]…
Therefore, they engage in alarmist arguments in order to scare the public for financial gain and political power. And if they can achieve totalitarianism along the way, so much the better.”
So you’re unhappy at being labelled with a particular word, but are quick to label your opponents as totalitarians. Looks like a double standard there, Smokey.
Completely different geology. Do not compare apples and oranges
You can be making profit in terms of $ signs, but if you are using more energy to harvest the resource than you are getting back, then the whole exercise is completely futile. That’s most drastic version of it, so that you can get the idea. In reality, it is no even sufficient to be making energy profit, it has to be a LARGE ENOUGH energy profit for things to makes sense and for the energy source to be able to sustain a civilization. And this is as inaccurate science as it get, for obvious reasons, but the thinking is that a civilization like ours needs an EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested) of at least 10. Oil shales and tar sands are way below that, in the 3-5 range, and that’s without the environmental costs. If you think of it in terms of entropy and you factor in the environmental costs, it is even worse.
Again, money do not do work and they do not feed people. In theory, money is a token for energy, a claim on physical work. If there was a 1:1 relationship between those, then we could think about things in terms of money. And there is some correlation between prices and thermodynamic costs, but first, the two things have become too decoupled for price to a reliable indicator, and second, thinking of things in terms of money has made us forget that energy is what matters, so we take it fro granted (modern economic does not do energy, it assumes it is an ever expanding resource that will always meet demand). Which has made us totally disconnected from the physical reality we live in
Sorry, I wasn’t aware it was not open access, I was able to open it with no problems, but then I have the university library account behind my IP. I can upload it somewhere if you really want to read it (it is a minor enough crime I guess)
The Chinese article was completely randomly chosen (it was the first one that examined isotops and origins of the organic molecules in a field I saw). The point is that those were organic molecules that came from organisms (which you can tell by the isotope composition). As such it is very relevant to the subject. It doesn’t directly state that the abiogenetic theory is rubbish, but it doesn’t need to, as this wouldn’t be the objective of a regular research article in the field, given that the standard model in it is biogenesis of oil.
So if I eat some dolomite diet supplement, does that make my body fat non-biogenic as the isotope ratio will be “wrong’? I think folks ascribe far more to C12/C13 ratios than in justified by the reality.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/the-trouble-with-c12-c13-ratios/
@Brian H: I always loved the way we find hydrocarbons all over the solar system, but here they must be of biologic origin. Yeah, sure… So we have had gigatons of primordial methane land as comet debris, but all the methane today is from plants and animals. We have zeolite rocks that under heat and pressure will convert methane into heavier hydrocarbons. We have subduction of rocks bearing a lot of Carbon that are known to produce hydrocarbons when subjected to intense heat and pressure as happens in the subduction zones (which also are some of the most oil rich lands in the world…) and yet it’s got to be ‘dino-juice’. Uh Huh… IMHO, the most likely explanation is that hydrocarbons are natural non-biologic products that end up also being made by biologic / biogenic sources too. It’s not an “either or” but a “both”.
Coal is biologic in origin. Gas and oil are mixed source. And that’s why the c12 / c13 ratios vary widely from deposit to deposit.
There is a discussion of abiotic oil down a ways here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
under the “oil” heading.
@Bruce: The notion of Energy Return On Investment is what’s being pushed. The idea that we ‘run out’ sooner than expected when it costs to much energy to produce it. This ignores the fact that the FORM of the energy matters a great deal. If I can “lift” oil at $80 / bbl to fuel my car, but it takes 20 times the energy content, I don’t really care at all when I’m using electric pumps to do it and they are driven by functionally unlimited nuclear power at a cost of $30. So don’t let the folks pushing the “running out” scare get that one past you.
FWIW, we can MAKE oil at about $50 / bbl from TRASH (and coal and trees and…). The major impediments to doing it are political and OPEC. We tax the synthetics that same as the OPEC oil (a mistake) and we have OPEC threats to open the tap and drive oil to $40 / bbl (as they have done in the past…). Hard to get funding from a bank when they know you can be put out of business whenever OPEC wants… As has happened in the past…
There simply is no energy shortage, and there never will be. There is a shortage of political will to stand up to OPEC and make our own oil. Synthetic or otherwise.
And since I see the Malthusian “running out of stuff” is circulating up thread too:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
Until we start blasting megatons of stuff into space, it’s all still here. The form changes, but we never “run out”. I just did a tour of the California Missions. Mud, straw, some timbers. You can literally build cathedrals out of that stuff, and it’s in as much supply as you could ever want.
And per the Log Growth nonsense: Real populations have S shaped growth curves, not Log. It just looks Log when you are down near the bottom half. Please stop scaring yourself and the children with bad math and go take a biology course where you can watch all sorts of S shaped growth happen.
Repeat after me: We never run out of stuff. We have unlimited energy and abundance available to us. We ought to take care of the planet, but also enjoy the bounty it provides. We never run out of stuff. We have unlimited energy and abundance available …
GM,
“Currently the energy use of computers is approaching 10% of the total. So yes, they information technologies use absolutely no resources…”
But computer processor speeds increases with time, does it not? By Moore’s law, doubling every 18 months or so. But as far as I am aware, a PC today, does not consume more power than one produced 10 years ago – actually less power. So there we have it, processor speeds are outstripping GDP growth by a factor of about 20 times, which means growth in computing can be acheived with no increase in energy use per capita while contributing to economic growth. I call that a win win situation.
I then wrote:
” But as society becomes wealthier, individuals consume an even greater intangible – leisure. This is all made possible by growth in economic productivity, that provides more free time, allowing people to consume movies, meals out, health clubs, hotels, beauty therapy, lifestyle coaching.”
And you replied: “And those things don’t use any resources either….”
You got it. They actually consume less resources. When a family, using the wealth provided by economic growth goes and eats a meal in a restuarant, they forgoe preparing and eating at home. The restaurant buys food in bulk, and by economy of scale is able to prepare meals for the diners at a lower energy cost than if each of them cooked separately at home. Wealth of the dinners is transfered to the wages of restaurant staff who provide the service in return.
“Yes, it doesn’t leave the earth. But its entropy is much higher once it ends up in the oceans. ”
Why should it end up in the oceans? Materials to be recycled are taken to recycling centers, not left to be erroded for thousands of years. The whole point of recycling is that it costs less energy to process say an aluminum can than it does to extract the metal from bauxite.
Well I loved that debate and learned a lot.
Thanks to all those who contributed some very interesting links and also to the contributors who recognise the “not either / or but ‘and’ ” principle.
Special thanks to GM – “priceless”!
Entropy? Oceans? Gah. All material and energy interactions end up increasing entropy, but it’s the steps inbetween which are fun. The sun’s entropy is increasing massively, but we’re siphoning off some of that action with our local negative entropy mini-loop.
EMS;
Excellent post. Thx for the links.
GM;
August 5, 2010 at 12:59 am
…
I wonder just when Titan’s “Carboniferous” era was.
Completely different geology. Do not compare apples and oranges
___
Sez who? The geology of planets and planetoids in the solar system and beyond is only trivially and barely comprehended, with major terra incognita on all sides. And as Feynman said, when the evidence contradicts the theory (“guess”) the theory (“guess”) is wrong. That’s the definition of science.
The solar system makes hydrocarbons in overwhelmingly large quantities. Anyone who claims to know how it got distributed is simply a liar.
You dodged the question, and no, Titan does not have apples and oranges either.
IF (big word) there are indeed oil pools on Titan, where did they come from? And since Titan is lifeless, would that not at least cast doubt on the smug and arrogant notion that abiogensis oil is dead?
I am not saying (nor was the OP) that oil on Titan proves abiogensis oil on Earth. But it does prove that carbon life is not necessary to create it.
Brian H says:
PhilJourdan says:
Bingo, and bingo.
As I said before, I’m not jumping onto an abiotic stand, but I am questioning the factual assertion that the gasoline I put in my car last night came from deceased animals.
People who argue based on “because I said so” or “because that’s what everyone says” are not very convincing.
If petroleum is biotic, why is it rising and why does it pool underneath nonporous formations? Wouldn’t you expect it to be sinking and pooling above such formations? If it has sunk over millions of years, what changed to cause it to rise now?
Again, I’m asking questions, not making factual assertions.