Genius, or Plain Old Greed?

I get annoyed with the T. Boone Pickens windmill commercials. Windmills are eyesores, and it turns out they cause a lot of environmental damage, in the form of dead birds. And the low-frequency sound they emit supposedly has devastating health effects on some animals and people. Apart from that, they draw attention away from safe, clean, abundant nuclear power, which we have utterly failed to exploit. Maybe the hazards of windmills can be beaten, but right now, the people who promote them are sweeping the issue under the rug.

One thing he says seems intelligent, however. He’s pushing natural gas as a fuel. And today I saw a news story saying many people in Utah are already using it, at a cost that compares to 87-cent gasoline.

That sounds wonderful. But I seem to recall a troubling principle called “supply and demand.” Right now, almost nobody owns a gas-powered car. That means the vehicle-driven demand for natural gas is negligible. Now, what if we convert a hundred million vehicles? What happens then? The figure may be 87 cents now, but for all I know, it could rise to fifty dollars when we’re all bidding on the same cubic foot of gas. And I can’t find the information on the web. It’s such an obvious threshold question. Has T. Boone even considered it?

People say Apple computers are immune to viruses and hacks. That’s a huge lie. The reason Apples are safer is that they make up a small percentage of the market, and hackers want to wreak as much havoc as possible, so they usually program for Windows. As Apples become more popular, they are proving just as vulnerable as Windows computers. Probably more vulnerable, because the Apple people think they’re safe, and they’re not trying as hard to protect themselves. The same sort of idea applies to gas-powered cars. The more of them there are, the lower the gas price advantage will probably be.

Look how the price of corn skyrocketed when we decided it was a fuel.

His site says our gas reserves are twice as big as our petroleum reserves. That’s no answer. Does he mean they contain twice the useful energy? Twice the volume? The site doesn’t say. The best scenario would be if the gas reserves contained twice the energy. But that still doesn’t tell you what the gas would cost when you pull up at a service station.

Critics point out that the same people who now sell us oil have most of the world’s gas, so we might be dependent on them even after a mass conversion. If their gas is cheaper, we’ll buy it and let ours sit in the ground. And T. Boone is up to his eyeballs in potentially profitable wind and gas investments, so he has a powerful motive to push these alternatives regardless of whether they make sense. He didn’t become a billionaire through altruism.

Oil shale and oil sand still look mighty good. The break-even point is way below the current price of oil, and we have reserves so huge they give the Saudis nightmares. And oil is a marvelous fuel, and we’re already set up to use it. Ethanol is a disgraceful CO2-belching joke. We need to think about solutions that actually work, without causing famine or grotesque environmental damage.

Maybe the answer is to use gas for fleet vehicles, which don’t have to rely on a network of stations, and to power most of our passenger cars with oil from shale. It looks like Pickens may be more interested in feathering his already-huge nest than in helping the planet.

He says he’s been an oil man all his life, and now he’s pushing windmills and gas. Doesn’t that kind of make sense, now that he’s a windmills-and-gas man?

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If you want disturbing news, go to the Pickens site and use their handy natural-gas-station locator. The places nearest to my house are in the next county. After that, I believe you have to go to Atlanta. The locator also says what the current “gallon” price is. In Atlanta, it’s $2.54. Down here, it’s $1.50 and $1.20. So 87¢ is already optimistic. I had a gas-powered car right now, I’d have to drive sixty miles to fill up, and I’d pay a minimum of $1.20.