by A. Barton Hinkle
The oceans are now roughly 30 percent more acidic than in the
pre-industrial era. And unlike future climate change, the effects
are already apparent. Just head down to the Tidewater area of
Virginia or out to coastal Oregon and talk to the folks who raise
shellfish.
Four years ago the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in
Tillamook, Ore., lost millions of oyster larvae. The company found
the problem was, yep, the overly acidic ocean water it was pumping
in. Now it treats the water when the pH balance falls too far. “For
us, the only thing that is correlate
d with mortality is the CO2
level,” said owner Sue Cudd. She was talking to the magazine
Seafood Business, not some Soros-funded outfit cranking
out leftist agitprop. If current trends continue, by century’s end
the oceans could be twice as acidic as they are now. Ocean
acidification matters, says Shallin Busch of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, because of “the fish we eat
and the things we make money off of.”
Before we all put on the sackcloth and ashes, though, note some
good news: America’s carbon-dioxide emissions are actually falling.
In fact, they have not been this low since 1992. And while no
single factor can account for the entire shift, much of the credit
goes to something environmentalists often detest: hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking.
Among power sources, the worst source of CO2 emissions by far is
coal. Natural gas generates half the CO2 per kilowatt-hour, and in
the past few years natural gas has displaced coal to a remarkable
degree. This year gas-fired electricity generation equaled
coal-fired generation for the first time. According to the Energy
Information Administration, that trend will continue as shale gas
production rises from 5 trillion cubic feet in 2010 to more than 13
trillion cubic feet in 2035. Fracking made this
possible—by opening up the Marcellus shale deposit in Pennsylvania
and many others. Twelve years ago, shale gas made up 2 percent of
the U.S. supply. It now makes up 37 percent.
All of that was achieved without government direction—and in the
face of considerable environmental resistance. Now the world’s
worst CO2 emitter, China—which gets 80 percent of its electricity
from coal—has taken up fracking too. China’s natural-gas
reserves are 50 percent bigger than America’s. If climate change is
the worst danger facing the planet, as some environmentalists
contend, then Chinese fracking should be good news.
But most environmentalists hate fracking. Instead, they
have placed their bets on other horses—many of which have come up
lame (see: Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, A123 Systems, et al.).
And even green-energy pursuits insulated from market forces pack a
remarkably weak punch. The Navy has just built a 10-acre
solar-panel field at its Norfolk Naval Station, at a cost of $21
million in Obama stimulus money. It can power all of 200 homes—a
mere 2 percent of the naval station’s power needs. An audit says
the money saved on utility bills will recoup the project’s costs in
roughly 447 years (not a typo).
This is part of a bigger pattern going back decades, in which
environmentalists and politicians have backed loser after
loser—from the Synthetic Fuels Corporation of the 1970s to the
Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles in the 1990s.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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