Maurice, I am not that naive but thanks for your concern re the digging and fracking part. OK, maybe fracking is causing some minor local "earthquakes" and maybe even serious water issues but...? It is the burning part that is the very real concern to me although I must admit I have now and then wondered what happens to those dry holes in the upper part of the earth's crust that contained all that vegetation turned into oil that has been removed. I know, I know...you are a geologist also and have the answer. I may be able to answer your question with a little experiment that you can do in your kitchen.
1. Get a typical transparent glass from your cupboard.
2. Fill it half full with sand or even pebbles
3. Put enough water into the glass such that all of the sand is saturated with water.
4. Draw a line on the side of the glass that corresponds to the top of the sand
5. this next step will take a little while to complete. You need to drain the water from the sand without removing any of the sand. You may be able to get rid of some of it by tipping the glass or dabbing the surface with a dry paper towel. You can let the glass stand in a sunny window for a while so that the water evaporates. You can help it along by stirring the sand and exposing wet sand. Given enough time, the water will evaporate completely such that the sand is now dry.
6. When the sand is dry, compare the level of the saturated sand with that of the dry sand. Is it different? more or less?
Petroleum is found in porous rock or sediments. Not in giant underground open pools or lakes.
Think of it like ground water. If you dig a well down to the water table, that well will fill with water that saturates the surrounding layer of permeable earth.
That's not to say that some subsidence in oil fields doesn't occur on occasion. It can and does in some places. When it does, it can be mitigated by pumping salt water into the well and capping it to normalize the pressure.
Subsidence in natural gas fracking locations is rare enough or insignificant enough to have no examples that have caused any negative effect on manmade structures or geologic features. The whole point of fracking is to break up the natural gas bearing rock such that the gas can escape up the borehole. Again, the gas is not hanging out in giant underground caverns.
But enough of that....your real concern is the harmful effects of global warming caused by CO2 that was released by manmade processes.
My take is that we are smart enough today to take care of our energy needs with renewables which ok, eliminates the digging part but goes after the most serious issue; the rapidly expanding atmospheric pollution which is causing climate change (global warming) and more and more identified problems in the seas. We need to get really serious about it now.
But first, let's eliminate some of the distractions.
1. Rising oceans/Coastal threats. Sea levels have gone up and down both locally and globally and for both brief and prolonged periods of time throughout the existence of the oceans. They are in constant flux. And sometimes the sea level hasn't really changed, but the relationship between the coastal land and the sea has changed due to the land either rising or subsiding. The point is, building your home or city on a coastal boundary comes with inherent risk. The risks include hurricanes, tsunamis, landslides, storm surges, erosion and I am sure quite a few others. The current "sea level" is arbitrary and defined as "good" based on the fact that it is where humans decided the optimum sea level constant should be in the context of providing the least amount of risk for the greatest amount of benefit to humans. As far as the planet and the various resident life forms are concerned, 10 feet lower or higher doesn't really matter. Assuming the worst case scenario of the global warming gang, you can't build your house on Carbon Beach in Malibu and claim that you didn't understand that there was going to be a risk of the pacific ocean ending up in your living room. And you also can't build your city below sea level in an area that is so prone to tropical storms that the local favorite alcoholic beverage is called a "hurricane", and then claim that you didn't understand that there was some risk to your business and home.
2. The polar bears were never in any danger. Polar bears go out on to the ice flows with the intent of hunting. They don't go to where the ice is so thick that a sea lion or other related animal can't get through the ice to breathe. The polar bears are there to hunt. And their hunting grounds necessarily have to be in some state of melt. They are not going to be surprised by a big flash of global warming that melts all of the surrounding ice and leaves them a thousand miles from shore with no place to climb out and rest.
3. We are not worried about droughts or desertification caused by global warming. Warming causes increased evaporation from the oceans. This will cause more rain....fewer droughts.
4. We are not actually worried about the CO2. CO2 is not a pollutant. Plants need it to live. Humans exhale a little less than 2000lbs of CO2 annually. And even with that high number, CO2 is still just a non-toxic trace gas. It is a natural by-product of the respiratory process of animals and it is what plants breathe. Plants need and love CO2. The more CO2 we have, the better they grow (along with their ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere while replacing it with O2). If CO2 is a pollutant, the only way that man can stop polluting his environment is to commit suicide. And even then, the decomposition process will release CO2.
So, if we remove the noise, it basically defines our concerns for global warming as those effects that are net harmful to humans. I'll leave the details to you on this one since I believe that global warming is likely net positive for humans.
Assuming that your worst case global warming scenarios are real, you still can't take a position on this until you have done a cost/benefit analysis. If the elimination of fossil fuels shuts down global warming and you are able to definitively show that it saves the lives of 20,000 coastal dwellers, 10 polar bears and two African tigers, but at the same time the policies eliminate 80,000 jobs in the Mining, Oil and Gas industry, thus increasing the number of poor people who cannot afford the new higher priced power or the products whose prices have gone up due to the higher fuel costs. And of course, since the grid is now powered by unreliable solar and wind energy that is pretty much useless for baseload power, many millions of people will be without power whenever there is any slight hint of extreme weather. What happens when the power doesn't come on and the stores don't open four days after a big storm goes through the northeast metropolitan areas? Not only would you see people dying from the elements, after three days, most people will start to panic and we would see riots where many people are killed or injured.
Assuming that all of the worst case scenarios of global warming are real (which I don't), until there is an honest assessment of the costs ,in human terms, of eliminating fossil fuels and then an honest comparison that convincingly shows that the benefits of eliminating fossil fuels clearly outweigh the cost of keeping them, there is absolutely no justification for creating policy that is hostile to the fossil fuel industry.
An example of where policy was implemented based on half of the equation and the half that was used to justify the policy was erroneous, is that of how to handle forest fires. It was obvious to everyone that forest fires are bad. So the policy was to stamp them out immediately. So the benefit was that our forests didn't burn down and we had lots of pretty green trees. But the cost was that the undergrowth and forest detritus built up over time and created hotter longer lasting fires that actually burned the trees beyond recovery. In addition, the naturally occurring periodic fast moving forest fires were needed for some evergreen seed cones to release their seeds. Without the natural fires, undergrowth took over the forest floor and no new trees were sprouting anyway, since the seeds were still stuck in their cone.
Most government solutions have similar one sided perspectives where the costs and unintended consequences are never considered. |
