Letter to the Editor
Oil independence
Published Wednesday, April 2, 2008
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To the editor:
Oil prices have risen to an astounding rate with barrels priced more than $100, resulting in increased costs for heating homes, transportation, and creating an energy crisis in Northern Alaska. Instead of returning to the past and accessing more sites for oil/gas, why not also look into the future to the booming technology of renewable energy?
Can you imagine the freedom of being more independent from oil? Technologies like wind, biomass, solar, small scale hydropower projects have the potential to impart significant environmental, health and economic benefits to communities throughout Alaska — projects that are initiated in your back yard.
Renewable energy projects offer independent Alaskans, energy security, jobs and solutions to climate change. A bill named HB 152 for such projects is currently discussed and makes good economic and environmental sense. For our and our children’s future, we should support the House Bill 152 and join in local renewable projects for everyone like — for example — Solar North.
Community Discussion
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the oil company tired to stop the water-4-fuel That our right to do save my fuel but i am ignoring on oil company they says!!!!!!!!!!!11
....what?
I dont think that posting at 1 am is so good when you seem to have been tired. I agree with akkid86... what? I would really like to hear what you are trying to say about water fuel (?)...
I imagine that he was talking about hydrogen fuel cells. Greece has built a submarine that is propelled by one of these. It is no accident that we are as reliant of petroleum as we are. The oil companies have a consistent track record of buying up competing technologies before they can be fully developed to a commercial scale.
http://www.evworld.com/news.cfm?newsid=1...
The oil companies haven't knocked on my door yet about my bicycles...buy that renewable energy technology....
Let's do the math!! Assume Solar North drives a Corolla that gets 30 mpg and he drives 30 miles/day (11,000 miles/yr). Solar North decides to go "independent" from oil and convert the Corolla to solar electric. The car uses 1 gal of gas each day and is 25% efficient, which mean he uses 30,000 BTUs (120,000 BTU/gal X 25%) to get to where he needs to go. Assuming his electric conversion is 100% efficient (it's not), he would need to generate 9.5 KWhrs per day of solar power to charge the car (30,000 BTU / 3412 BTU per KWhr). So assuming his solar panels get full sun for 8hrs/day (they won't), he would need an array of 28.5 KW capacity. Solar North patronized ABS Alaska and buys Kyocera 130W panels @ $676 each. He would need 219 panels at a cost of $148,000 (solar panels only....no batteries, charge controls, tracking arrays, wiring, etc.). The panel's would cover an area of 2200 sqaure feet...which is about 4 times the average south facing roof size. But, let's assume we apply oil company windfall profits taxes to solar panel research and we double their efficieny and reduce the cost in half. Solar North's array would still cost $37,000. That's at least attainable for some, but would be hardship for most everyone I know (especially for a family with more kids than can fit in a Corolla). Renewables will be an outstanding supplement to our energy needs, but aren't the silver bullet. We need conservation (ride the bus!!), more renewable research & project funding, and more oil & gas exploration and nuclear power. Anything less will result in extreme hardship for the average American family. I hope our politicians will answer "Yes" to all energy proposals (Oil and nuclear included)...because we're are going to need them all!!!
Do_the_math, here is an alternate math problem:
Let's assume instead that the owner of the Toyota Corolla sells that car and stops paying 15-30 percent of his household income on its gas, oil, tires, parking, I/M tests, registration, insurance, monthly payments, and unpredictable repair. He buys a house (or rents an apartment) in town that is near a grocery store and a public transit line that can take him to work. He also buys a bicycle and assumes financial responsibility for its upkeep.
(1) How much more money does he have at the end of a year than he did at the end of the previous year?
(2) Assuming that everybody in this former car-owner's community (of roughly 90,000) not engaged in agriculture does the same, how much more money will the community have in the first year that it can spend on education, health care, public beautification, or even personal aggrandizement?
--Paul Adasiak
"The Fairbanks Pedestrian" (http://fairbankspedestrian.wordpress.com...)
http://dieseltk.water4gas.hop.clickbank.... TO SAVE UR FUEL
Adasiak...You're right!!! The solution you propose works!!! No math is needed. My point is that we can't just say renewables alone will solve our problems and expect to live our current lifestyles...it will never add up!!
This is a great debate. Thanks Fairbanks Pedestrian and Do the Math for getting this started. I must say that DTM has done their homework! The Fairbanks as we know it, dependent on diesel and gas for heat and individual transportation (including moving water), is ripe for extinction. We are like most Americans who have not begun to accept the fact that 50 years of highway building and subsidizing the auto industry and giving the oil companies everything they want has led to a commuter culture which is absolutely unsustainable, even if we were to borrow the Star Trek Enterprise's mythical "dilithium crystals." The only solution, as the Fairbanks Pedestrian rightly points out, is to drive less.
Maybe we'll be healthier, walking a bit to the train station or riding our bikes to school. Maybe we'll get to know our neighbors, instead of shielding ourselves with glass and 60mph speeds. Maybe we'll actually have some impact in a Washington, D.C., which continues to be an impenetrable wall of energy and defense industry lobbyists.
Wake up Fairbanks! You can't keep driving your 10-cylinder, dually pickup truck with the 500-gallon water tank, 100 miles a day. Do THAT math. You probably are, actually, every time you swipe your card at the gas station.
Do_the_math, I think the problem -- and perhaps you agree? -- is that we expect to live our current lifestyles: large-lot, low-density, auto-intensive housing as the norm.
I apologize if my comment came off as catty or snide. Although you *did* mention riding the bus, I perceived "more energy alternatives" as the dominant part of your solution. While I agree in principle with the idea of multiple energy alternatives -- especially renewable ones -- I hope that we as a community can address our lifestyle excesses (and their resultant social ills) *before* sinking more money into an unsustainable habit.
--Paul Adasiak
The US energy situation is totally unsustainable and is headed in the wrong direction, not the right one. There simply is *not* an infinite supply, we are increasing our demand instead of decreasing it, and other countries are starting to compete for what energy resourcs there are. In addition, we have to spend 100's of billions securing "our" energy sources around the world, depend on nations whose views of us are very hostile, and suffer the harmful environmental effects fossil fuels and nuclear entail. No arguments or wishful thinking will change the fact that sooner or later we *ARE* going to stop burning oil. Period, end of story, no math to do.
The longer we put this off, the more we will have to cut back, and the more painful it will be; living in Alaska may even become economically impossible. It is PAST TIME for just studying and start *doing* efficiency, conservation, and clean, well-thought-out alternatives (NOT HYDRO!!!). The business as usual attitude displayed by far too many people can only lead to a crisis. We should get started on this while we still DO have oil and coal, instead of waiting until such a crisis occurs. Gasoline has got to GO, and nuclear is NOT the answer.
Adasiak
I see what you are saying, but it sounds a lot like cities in the soviet union. Live near where you work, ect ect. I dont want to live near a bunch of people. No offense to any people out there, but when you get together in groups, you guys are stupid. I like my privacy and freedom to choose. How about more tax breaks for people who live "off the grid?"
I hope you all can my point through my attempt at humor.
I am no scientist, can someone tell me if this would work?
A community, Alaskan community type, think spread out like the Badger road area. Everyone has solar panels on the roof and small home windmill on the property. All of the homes are tied to one another. Kind of like an electricity CO-OP or something. Maybe have a central battery bank or something.
I can see something like that being the future. Independent energy producers working together.
Just a thought.
Reader1, I'm not sure which part of your letter was supposed to be humorous, so I'll treat it all seriously.
When you refer to people who live "off the grid", do you mean that they don't have a day job on the grid? that they hunt, fish, gather, and grow their food, rather than shop for it on the grid? that they make their own clothing, rather than purchase it on the grid? that they get their water from a stream or lake and their heat from wood they chopped themselves, rather than have commodities trucked in by somebody on the grid? and that they walk or mush dogs to meet with other people, rather than drive a vehicle made and purchased on the grid over roads that *are* the grid?
If so, then I heartily endorse your proposal for tax breaks to that class of people! They are the truly rural, and the world needs more of them.
However, that life is a far cry from the suburban lifestyle pursued by many in the Fairbanks area. Sure, many people here hunt or garden to supplement their groceries -- and I think that's awesome! But neither a lifestyle of occasional hunting, nor living in a dry cabin where you have water and oil trucked in, nor hoarding twenty acres to yourself so you can pretend that you live in a wilderness preserve, makes you rural. There is no social good achieved (unless somebody can point it out to me?) by allowing people to hoard land, eschew community, and consume more energy. So no tax breaks for the suburban.
Living near your place of work, as well as near where you shopped, near where your played, and near other people, was not an invention of the Soviet Union. In fact, that way of living only started to perish at about the time the Soviet Union began -- with the advent of private automobiles. Compact settlement, with the full range of civic amenities within walking distance of neighborhood or city centers, has been the norm since the dawn of civilization (farmers and shepherds excepted). It is only the ubiquity of private cars (with government subsidy of the roads they require) that has allowed the great mass of people to flee the obligations of community while trying to keep civilization's material comforts.
I'm not sure what you mean by, "when you get together in groups, you guys are stupid." The genius of cities is that they bring people together for frequent and unexpected "exchanges": cultural, commercial, social, and intellectual. The only way in which I can see city-dwellers being (almost necessarily) more "stupid" is that they probably fail to develop a deep and intimate understanding of nature, as farmers and hunter-gatherers have. But in other senses, cities breed intelligence and culture, not stupidity.
Good points, I should have been more clear. Off the grid, I was referring to homes not being connected to "traditional" power grid.
I understand why people gather in cities and see the benefits, however I choose to live away from all that and only visit when I have to.
The "culture" that you speak of, I take that to mean "lets get together and decide how other people should live."
Hoard land? Property rights are the foundation of a free people. Ask the millions of Chinese people who are right now being kicked out of their apartments so the state can tear them down for the "good of the people," about property.
I think you know exactly what I am saying and just want to argue.
Reader1 -- to be honest, I'm pooping out on this discussion.
Whether "property rights are the foundation of a free people" or not is a little too philosophical for me. You may be right, but that really calls for a longer, more deliberative discussion (and one that would be better done in person, or with a group of people) than I have time for right now. (What do we mean by property rights? Must they be unrestricted to be meaningful? Are there corresponding "property obligations"? In what circumstances can property rights conflict with other rights or human needs? You see that this gets pretty deep, pretty fast.)
My points were not made just to argue; they came out of a sincere desire to further a discussion -- one that may get unmanageably philosophical for this forum.
I feel sorry that for you "culture" seems to mean restriction. Perhaps you feel sorry that I seem to equate property with hoarding (which I don't). We'll just have to agree to feel sorry for each other.
Respectfully,
Paul Adasiak
i'm with reader1. humans can be extremely difficult to live near. space is a good thing. crammed tight into a community of "human intelligence" (an oxymoron if i ever saw one) and psuedo intellectual nonsense can about drive a person insane. living where you work DOES sound like the old soviet style, where they would build an industry and then house the workers in awful looking apartments next to the work place. we americans have busted our butts trying to avoid having to live like that, and we succeeded for quite a while. it is, unfortunately unsustainable (apparently). but it was nice while it lasted.
i feel having a menagerie or power producing methods like wind mills here, solar panels there, compost biomass piles (or whatever they are) there, small hydro dam over here, sounds like total chaos, being way to complicated to ever effectly manage, and subject to constant failure. face it, barring unforseen miracles, it's over.
Adasiak makes a good point about what constitutes "off the grid". I'm sure Reader1 means "off the electrical grid", which is what most people mean by this term.
As for reversion to essentially a pre-historic lifestyle, I don't think anything even remotely so extreme is neccessary; if *everyone* would simply take certain relatively easy steps (turn off lights, turn down heat, don't do excessive driving, recycle, use compact fluorescent light lightbulbs etc.) we could make a lot of difference. We also have to government-fund key research (such as raising the efficiency of solar collectors). Industry will not do this since it doesn't promise the "instant gratification" of greed they require. (It would help if such funded research were then licensed to industry for a fair price, instead of for a song, like it usually is...).
The 'compact settlement' idea is also a good one. Sooner or later the idea that a 50, 100, -mile or more commute is ones' right to choose will have to end, for everyone's good. Want to live rural? Then do the kind of work you can do living in the countryside....or do what I do a couple days a week (like today): telecommute.
I agree that we all need to do our little part, I dont agree that it should be government funded. I think that all levels of Gov. take way to much of our money as it is and their management of these monies is poor at best. Private industry is where the change and inovation lie. Self interest will drive people to live "green" and spark ideas and green companies. I dont trust the Gov. with my money.
When did people stop questioning the government and start depending on them for ANYTHING?
Sorry to rant.
Leaving this up to 'industry' to do is a way of guaranteeing that we have to go through a crisis situation. In fact industry has done more to STIFLE progress in this area than anything else (see Fairbanksgas' comment above). For another example consider the mis-information campaign they have mounted against against C.F.L.s and for 'alternatives' that make no sense (such as "clean" coal and ethanol) except that they represent profits. No, the idea that the profit motive is ALWAYS the way to go is simply patently absurd. Properly harnessed it CAN do alot of good, but when allowed to trump logic and morality it is terrible. This isn't even hard to demonstrate.
AH, I used the word "industry." My bad. Replace that with "Private sector."
I never used the word "profit" I used "self interest."
I think the change that we both want (I think that would be a shift from an energy policy dependent on oil and one that uses renewable sources) is going to be driven more from the bottom up, than the Oil soaked government down.
"from the bottom up" . . . Right, in other words a crisis will have to be reached (we're getting there already). *I* think it would be a lot better if we had solutions in place while we have the time to take our time and do it right, rather suddenly have to rush and end up with half-baked solutions that haven't been adequately evaluated. Industry, private sector, whichever one uses, will *not* do this work if it cannot profit from it. Again the knee-jerk idea that private = 'good' government = 'bad' is simply false. And in this case it is actively retarding research and change that threatens its income. There are literally thousands of examples of this....
When in Rome...
-Ron Burgundy
Ma