Oil Prices Drop Below $60 For First Time In More Than 5 Years

[JDDavis]

22. So you would like to pay $20 per barrel to burn the fuel?

What are you willing to pay to clean up the pollution burning that fuel creates?

Is that the real price of burning the fuel? Or do future generations pay another $1000 for cleaning up the pollution from that fuel in that barrel?

Making fossil fuels cheaper only makes them more readily available and more quickly consumed.

The only possible way to reduce carbon emissions worldwide is to develop carbon neutral or passive solar and geothermal sources of energy/power. We are only just beginning down that long road and have developed few marginal and minimally effective technologies that do that, just as we once used candles and wood and whale oil to light and heat our domiciles and workplaces, we then began 150 years of developing the most polluting technologies of burning fossil fuel in order to suit our lighting, heating, cooling and transportation needs.

175 years from the horse drawn carriage on a country road to the jet plane airports and automobile superhighways, from the whale oil lamp and fireplace to the light emitting diode light bulb and microwave oven, from the water-powered gristmills and factory looms to the steel and aluminum refineries, fossil fuel-derived chemical fertilizers and water-polluting, toxic chemical-producing microchip and other manufacturing processes all in the last 175 years. We knit very few lamb's wool or cotton sweaters, some factory somewhere mass-produces sweaters from oil byproduct derived Orlon, Rayon, and cotton blends, on an electric powered loom, electricity derived almost entirely from coal, oil or natural gas.

All of these "modern" technologies for energy production and manufacturing and transportation are pollution producing on the most gigantic of scales. No wonder our glaciers are melting so fast, our Arctic and Antarctic sea ice is disappearing.

There is no easy way to turn this giant trajectory around, and no sufficiently developed non-polluting technology presently available to do the whole job, at any cost. That doesn't mean we are doomed, only that we are continuing to take baby steps in what should be a worldwide expedition into a new realm of technological breakthroughs and direction-reversing solutions. No one passive solar, geothermal, or other technology can solve the entire problem, we need more solutions, more research more observation and a more unified worldwide commitment to accomplishing a goal probably a century or more away.

By then, yes, the planet will face seemingly unfathomable challenges and changes in land use, and even land footprint, more land and ice still falling into the seas every year. California may be mostly desert, Miami and Key West may be a few more feet underwater, New Orleans and other coastal cities in the world a past memory like a fabled lost city of Atlantis, (or other actual, once-existent Mediterranean island cities, which probably were victims of volcanoes like Pompeii).

But the search and the effort to find a way to power our complex world of 7+ + billions must continue. The first step of which is getting rid of the massive corporate-sponsored influence of climate change denialists, and the willingness to work WITH China and other huge populations toward a common worldwide variety of sensible, economically feasible solutions.
Windmills and solar panels and hybrid cars are baby steps in the right direction, but, of course, no one sees those as anything more than baby steps along the way, worthwhile, yes, but no final answer.

In a way, I'm glad that within 25-50 years from now I won't be around to see how bad it gets before it begins to get any better.