Everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong The future of energy is not what you think

it is By Michael Lind * Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades ? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated pub lic have been taught to believe in the past generation. According to the convent ional wisdom, the U.S. and other industrial nations must undertake a rapid and e xpensive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy for three reasons: The imminent depletion of fossil fuels, national security and the danger of global warming. What if the conventional wisdom about the energy future of America and the world has been completely wrong? As everyone who follows news about energy knows by now, in the last decade the t echnique of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," long used in the oil industry, h as evolved to permit energy companies to access reserves of previously-unrecover able shale gas or unconventional natural gas. According to the U.S. Energy Informa tion Administration, these advances mean there is at least six times as much rec overable natural gas today as there was a decade ago. Natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, can be used in both elec tricity generation and as a fuel for automobiles. The implications for energy security are startling. Natural gas may be only the beginning. Fracking also permits the extraction of previously-unrecoverable tight oil, thereby postponing the day when the world runs out of petroleum. There is e nough coal to produce energy for centuries. And governments, universities and co rporations in the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries are studying ways to o btain energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with ice in high-density forma tions under the seafloor. The potential energy in gas hydrates may equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of natural gas, combined. If gas hydrates as well as shale gas, tight oil, oil sands and other unconventio nal sources can be tapped at reasonable cost, then the global energy picture loo ks radically different than it did only a few years ago. Suddenly it appears tha t there may be enough accessible hydrocarbons to power industrial civilization f or centuries, if not millennia, to come. So much for the specter of depletion, as a reason to adopt renewable energy tech nologies like solar power and wind power. Whatever may be the case with Peak Oil in particular, the date of Peak Fossil Fuels has been pushed indefinitely into the future. What about national security as a reason to switch to renewable ener gy? The U.S., Canada and Mexico, it turns out, are sitting on oceans of recoverable natural gas. Shale gas is combined with recoverable oil in the Bakken "play" alo ng the U.S.-Canadian border and the Eagle Ford play in Texas. The shale gas rese rves of China turn out to be enormous, too. Other countries with now-accessible natural gas reserves, according to the U.S. government, include Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, France, Poland and India. Because shale gas reserves are so widespread, the potential for blackmail by Mid dle Eastern producers and Russia will diminish over time. Unless opponents of fr acking shut down gas production in Europe, a European Union with its own natural gas reserves will be far less subject to blackmail by Russia (whose state monop oly Gazprom has opportunistically echoed western Greens in warning of the danger

s of fracking). The U.S. may become a major exporter of natural gas to China -- at least until C hina borrows the technology to extract its own vast gas reserves. Two arguments for switching to renewable energy -- the depletion of fossil fuels and national security -- are no longer plausible. What about the claim that a r apid transition to wind and solar energy is necessary, to avert catastrophic glo bal warming? The scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low prob ability outcomes -- a fact that explains why the world s governments in practice t reat reducing CO2 emissions as a low priority, despite paying lip service to it. But even if the worst outcomes were likely, the rational response would not be a conversion to wind and solar power but a massive build-out of nuclear power. N uclear energy already provides around 13-14 percent of the world s electricity and nearly 3 percent of global final energy consumption, while wind, solar and geot hermal power combined account for less than one percent of global final energy c onsumption. (The majority of renewable energy consists of CO2-emitting biomass -- wood and d ung used for fires by the world s poor, plus crops used to make fuel; most of the remainder comes from hydropower dams denounced by Greens.) The disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima have dramatized the real but limited an d localized dangers of nuclear energy. While their initial costs are high, nucle ar power plants generate vast amounts of cheap electricity -- and no greenhouse gases. If runaway global warming were a clear and present danger rather than a l ow probability, then the problems of nuclear waste disposal and occasional local disasters would be minor compared to the benefits to the climate of switching f rom coal to nuclear power. The arguments for converting the U.S. economy to wind, solar and biomass energy have collapsed. The date of depletion of fossil fuels has been pushed back into the future by centuries -- or millennia. The abundance and geographic diversity of fossil fuels made possible by technology in time will reduce the dependence o f the U.S. on particular foreign energy exporters, eliminating the national secu rity argument for renewable energy. And if the worst-case scenarios for climate change were plausible, then the most effective way to avert catastrophic global warming would be the rapid expansion of nuclear power, not over-complicated sche mes worthy of Rube Goldberg or Wile E. Coyote to carpet the world s deserts and pr airies with solar panels and wind farms that would provide only intermittent ene rgy from weak and diffuse sources. The mainstream environmental lobby has yet to acknowledge the challenge that the new energy realities pose to their assumptions about the future. Some environme ntalists have welcomed natural gas because it is cleaner than coal and can suppl ement intermittent solar power and wind power, at times when the sun isn t shining or the wind isn t blowing. But if natural gas is permanently cheaper than solar a nd wind, then there is no reason, other than ideology, to combine it with renewa bles, instead of simply using natural gas to replace coal in electricity generat ion. Without massive, permanent government subsidies or equally massive penalty taxes imposed on inexpensive fossil fuels like shale gas, wind power and solar power may never be able to compete. For that reason, some Greens hope to shut down sha le gas and gas hydrate production in advance. In their haste, however, many Gree ns have hyped studies that turned out to be erroneous. In 2010 a Cornell University ecology professor and anti-fracking activist named

Robert Howarth published a paper making the sensational claim that natural gas i s a greater threat to the climate than coal. Howarth admitted, "A lot of the dat a we use are really low quality..." Howarth s error-ridden study was debunked by Michael Levi of the Council on Foreig n Relations and criticized even by the Worldwatch Institute, a leading environme ntalist organization, which wrote: "While we share Dr. Howarth s urgency about the need to transition to a renewable-based economy, we believe based on our resear ch that natural gas, not coal, affords the cleanest pathway to such a future." A few years ago, many Green alarmists seized upon a theory that an ice age 600 m illion years ago came to an abrupt end because of massive global warming caused by methane bubbling up from the ocean floor. They warned that the melting of the ice caps or drilling for methane hydrates might suddenly release enough methane to cook the earth. But before it could be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster, the methane apocalypse theory was debunked recently by a team of Caltech scienti sts in a report for the science journal Nature. All energy sources have potentially harmful side effects. The genuine problems c aused by fracking and possible large-scale future drilling of methane hydrates s hould be carefully monitored and dealt with by government regulation. But the Gr een lobby s alarm about the environmental side-effects of energy sources is highly selective. The environmental movement since the 1970s has been fixated religiou sly on a few "soft energy" panaceas -- wind, solar, and biofuels -- and can be c ounted on to exaggerate or invent problems caused by alternatives. Many of the s ame Greens who oppose fracking because it might contaminate some underground aqu ifers favor wind turbines and high-voltage power lines that slaughter eagles and other birds and support blanketing huge desert areas with solar panels, at the cost of exterminating much of the local wildlife and vegetation. Wilderness pres ervation, the original goal of environmentalism, has been sacrificed to the gian t metallic idols of the sun and the wind. The renewable energy movement is not the only campaign that will be marginalized in the future by the global abundance of fossil fuels produced by advancing tec hnology. Champions of small-scale organic farming can no longer claim that short ages of fossil fuel feedstocks will force a return to pre-industrial agriculture . Another casualty of energy abundance is the new urbanism. Because cars and truck s and buses can run on natural gas as well as gasoline and diesel fuel, the prop osition that peak oil will soon force people around the world to abandon automob ile-centered suburbs and office parks for dense downtowns connected by light rai l and inter-city trains can no longer be taken seriously. Deprived of the argume nts from depletion, national security and global warming, the campaign to increa se urban density and mass transit rests on nothing but a personal taste for expe nsive downtown living, a taste which the suburban working-class majorities in mo st developed nations manifestly do not share. Eventually civilization may well run out of natural gas and other fossil fuels t hat are recoverable at a reasonable cost, and may be forced to switch permanentl y to other sources of energy. These are more likely to be nuclear fission or nuc lear fusion than solar or wind power, which will be as weak, diffuse and intermi ttent a thousand years from now as they are today. But that is a problem for the inhabitants of the world of 2500 or 3000 A.D. In the meantime, it appears that the prophets of an age of renewable energy foll owing Peak Oil got things backwards. We may be living in the era of Peak Renewab les, which will be followed by a very long Age of Fossil Fuels that has only jus t begun.

* Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New Amer ica Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationali sm and the Fourth American Revolution." More: Michael Lind