Dear Editor,
Thomas Jefferson said “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” and being a slave owner, he'd know. I was reminded of this when I heard that Mulgrave County Council wanted to re-examine fracking, and then Inverness County Council also expressed an interest in revisiting the issue.
There have been some changes in the industry and science since NS examined the issue. A study published just this week showed exposure to fracking and drilling chemicals at background levels was sufficient to cause abnormalities in breast tissue of mice and since most everything we decide is safe is based on tests on mice, it’s just another of thousands of reasons not to invest in fossil fuels .
You would think that a province with a high ratio of coastline to land mass, connected to Canada by a marsh, would be active on the climate change front, I mean actively reducing emissions, actively planning for the inevitable sea level rises. Instead we have a government that invested two years in mapping potential fossil fuel reserves.
One thing about fracking hasn’t changed, in that no company has ever made a profit from the production and sale of shale gas or oil. We keep hearing how fracking is producing lots of oil and that is displacing Canadian bitumen, but what ware aren't being told is that the North American oil industry hasn’t posted a profit since 2013, and is producing lots of oil at a loss, (US oil industry losses for 2016 , $67 billion) but back to gas.
General Electric makes gas turbines, except the orders are way down, so they laid off 20,000 workers, while European manufacturer Siemens laid off 7,000 from its gas related activities . Several blogs have declared 2017 the end of natural gas. Several years ago a methane leak in California couldn't be contained, because they couldn't do without the gas, choosing to emit rather than shut down. After the disaster was fixed, they ordered a Tesla battery capable of running 15,000 homes. It was installed in 80 days .
Tesla recently completed a 100MW battery in Australia, delivered in under 100 days. Australia has been installing lots of solar and wind, that previously had been unreliable, batteries have changed that, and batteries are killing “peakers”. Peakers are turbines fired up when demand necessitates, and batteries can do the job, faster, and cheaper.
Gas is dead thanks to Lithium Ion batteries, and according to Stanford “leading thinker” Tony Seba, the confluences of solar and wind power, combined with improved battery life and efficiency, and electric vehicles, are set to kill the oil industry by 2030 .
The drivetrain of an electric vehicle has 18 moving parts, the Internal Combustion engine (ICE) drive train, over 2,000. Eighty per cent of the energy produced by ICE is wasted , only 20 per cent of an EV is wasted. EVs are so efficient , that even if powered by burning coal, they are less emitting that ICE. Suncorp has ordered 200, autonomous EVs for their bitumen mines, one of the ironies of the marketplace.
As Seba points out, as the costs of wind, solar, batteries, and EVs decrease, and because these are technologies, not commodities, their price will decrease, that will put downward pressure on oil prices, Seba predicts $25 a barrel oil by 2022, which will be enough to kill fracking and bitumen, which although currently unprofitable, can at today's prices cover debt payments.
And then there's climate change, it’s expensive . In October US Government Accountability Office, in response to a request from Congress, released its report on costs to property and infrastructure (not loss of life or negative health) from extreme weather linked to climate change to the US from 2007 through 2016, conservatively estimated at $350 billion. Last month the US NOAA released its conservative estimate for losses in the same categories for 2017 alone at $306 billion .
The idea of expanding fossil fuel use is as unconscionable as it is stupid. If there were ever an example of Einstein's theory that you can’t get out of a problem with the same thinking that created the problem, I haven't seen it.
The future is yet be determined, it’s too late to avoid climate change, but it might not be too late to avoid runaway greenhouse effect, aka catastrophic climate change. Google “three years to safeguard climate” it was written in 2017.
Sincerely,
Geoffrey May
Margaree harbour
