Today the whole country, and especially Washington, D.C., is abuzz with exciting proposals on how to lessen the impact of mankind on climate change. Leaving aside many fascinating and complex questions that surround this issue, I would like to address just one: What is the most effective way of substantially reducing the amount of CO2 emitted in this country?

In my view, it’s time to bring a realistic perspective to this problem. That means looking at the cold hard facts of the supply side of energy use in this country. If we convert all energy use, including transportation and electricity generation, to barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d), the United States consumes about 47.4 million boe/d. Of that volume, about 19 million boe/d (40 percent) is oil, 11.9 million boe/d (25 percent) is natural gas, 11.5 million boe/d (24 percent) is coal, 3.8 million boe/d (8 percent) is nuclear and 1.1 million boe/d (2 percent) is hydropower. Wind and solar combined supply just 76,000 boe/d, which amounts to about 1/6 of 1 percent of our energy needs. That means we could double or even triple our production from those renewable sources without having any meaningful reduction in our CO2 emissions.

Despite that indisputable fact, much of the rhetoric coming out of Washington continues to emphasize the encouragement and funding of those two sources as if they are the “silver bullets” in this equation. I have nothing against either solar or wind energy and hope we expand both, but to hype them as the solution to our problem is akin to asserting that we can control a severe flood on the Mississippi River by damming up a five-foot-wide creek in Iowa!

For the complete article:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6520356.html