The facts behind the energy debate

The experts tell us that we are running out of oil and natural gas. But then they've been telling us that at least since 1914, when the Bureau of Mines warned that US oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. This and many other useful facts can be found in George Will's latest Washington Post collumn.

In fact, we are discovering more domestic reserves of oil and natural gas every year.
Billions of barrels of oil have been discovered during the last decade in the Lower Tertiary trend in the Gulf of Mexico and the Bakken Formation (a.k.a. the Williston Basin), which lies beneath North and South Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. The U.S. also has huge reserves of natural gas in various shale rock formations around the country. One formation, the Marcellus Shale in the eastern United States, may contain as much natural gas as the largest conventional field ever discovered. (In addition, the United States also has huge oil shale formations, and Canada, of course, has oil sands thay may contain more oil than Saudi Arabia.) So we are not going to run out of supplies of oil and natural gas any time soon.

Although the left touts solar and wind energy, they comprise only 1/6 of 1% of America's energy consumption. Compare that with coal, which currently provides 54% of our country's electricity (according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is not at all happy about this state of affairs). It is unrealistic to think that wind and solar will supply 20% of this country's energy in the foreseeable future.

The left regards wind and solar technology as new energy sources with vast potential. Unfortunately, that is not true. Wind power has been around for over four centuries (Don Quixote tilted at windmills, remember). The photovoltaic process utilized by solar panels was discovered in the 19th century. Albert Einstein wrote a paper in 1905 describing the nature of light and the photoelectric effect on which solar technology is based -- a paper for which he was later rewarded the Nobel Prize in physics. So neither technology is new, and it would be wildly optimistic to assume that either technology has huge, undiscovered potential.

The only compelling reason to wean ourselves from hydrocarbons and clean coal is the purported threat of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Contrary to the party line, many reputable scientists are skeptical about the fact and/or extent of AGW. And the documents recently obtained from many AGW proponents, including those at the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), strongly suggest that at least some of these proponents may have been cooking, or at least simmering, the scientific books.

Thank heaven the Copenhagen Summit is unlikely to result in anything substantive based on speculative and perhaps even fraudulent science.