T. Boone Pickens, the biggest advocate for the expansion of wind energy in America, argued his cause against Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal.
Pickens began the argument by stressing the necessity for America to relinquish its dependence on foreign oil by embracing green energy technologies. He expanded on this point by providing thorough knowledge on existing resources, their allocation, and the feasibility of maintaining our current lifestyle. In short, we can't. According to Pickens, who has worked and managed energy plants for his entire life, if America scoured its lands for nonrenewable energy, it'd be able to provide just four million barrels of oil a day for a limited number of years. Currently, the USA consumes 12 million barrels each day.
Moore, at this point, interjected with his views. "Oil doesn't come from the ground, it comes from our minds," he said, "I don't believe in peak oil."
Pickens, obviously flustered by the remark, emphasized the cost of drilling in these places. "Yeah, we can drill 30,000 feet into the Gulf of Mexico. It'll cost $120 million and, if we're lucky, we'll get four billion barrels, not the 20 billion figure that is being tossed around Congress," he argued. On more than one occasion, Pickens was able to provide statistical and monetary information that Moore was unaware of. Throughout the course of the debate, Moore repeatedly nodded his head in agreement with Pickens rebuttal. "Yes, well, you'd know those numbers better than I would," he said.
This, in my opinion, is a microcosm of America's energy ideologies. On one side, you have pragmatists who realize that our lifestyle is unsustainable and needs to move in a new direction. On the other side, people blinded by their preference to maintain the status quo skew figures and refuse to accept basic facts. Whether you believe oil is running dry or that it'll last forever, the truth is that oil is destroying our environment so, therefore, it's killing us. We have made the basic technological innovations to leave fossil fuels behind, but special interests only concerned with today's profits are hampering our progress. Let's move forward with these new ideas so that one day, years from now, we can watch this debate and chuckle at Stephen Moore's ignorance because, honestly, that's all his opinion deserves.
-Matt
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Super - I heard this very one-sided debate on C-SPAN today and couldn't agree more. I kept thinking, "this guy works for the Wall St. Journal?". Mr. Pickens not only had amazing insight and was able to quote statistic after statistic on every possible aspect of this debate, but even Mr. Moore asked him for help in quoting stats and figures that ended up disproving his own case. Too funny!!
Pickens is well worth listening to, that's for sure. To have a fellow so entrenched in oil arguing for wind, etc., should tell us something.
Post a Comment