Our Permanent Need for Hydrocarbons

Just suppose perfect, carbon-emissions-free electrical cars or hydrogen-powered vehicles could magically replace the 1.5 billion gasoline engines powering all the wheels of the world today: Would our ravenous need for and dependence upon hydrocarbons magically vanish? Of course not. You would have to be a contemptible scientifically illiterate clown like former US President Barack Obama or the late entirely unlamented warmongering Senator John McCain to believe that.

Back at the beginning of his fraudulent useless and warmongering presidency Obama told truly knowledgeable oil industry executive Harold Hamm (pictured), founder and CEO of Continental Resources, that within five years the creation of a wonderful new super-battery would at a stroke magically eliminate the soaring global demand for oil. Fifteen years on, that promise and prophecy, like every other one Obama ever made, has long since been exposed as a worthless, fraudulent lie. It never happened. The wonder battery, which McCain – while still supposedly sentient – proposed a vast financial award for inventing, remains un-invented. The unforgiving realities of physics, chemistry, and engineering are not so cavalierly denied.

But suppose – just suppose – the wonder battery of Obama and McCain’s infantile wet dreams had been invented and mass produced: Would we now be living in a beautiful green, purely solar and wind-powered Greta Thunberg world – holding hands and singing Kumbaya as we dance into our virtuous blue-green sunset with Judy Garland as Dorothy waiting there to greet us?

No. Of course not.

For Obama, Thunberg, Thomas Friedman, and their hundreds of millions of delusional worshippers across the fat cat, hypocritical delusional West would still demand their “clean” and antiseptic, so convenient smartphones, personal computers, data processing centers, global communications, and clean antiseptic plastics: Wouldn’t they? And far more important, a global population of 8 billion people – four times that of a century ago – would still need to be fed, wouldn’t they? And for growing all that food, the stone age purity of the American and Northern European environmentalists doesn’t have a clue. In my own direct observation, none of these people even knows how to successfully strike a match on a match box. The energy demands of how to fuel and generate reliable, high-density fueled ongoing electrical power to sustain life on a mass scale and power serious industry is way beyond all of them.

Rosneft CEO and former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin (pictured) spoke these simple, clear Words of Truth to the XVIIth Verona Eurasian Economic Forum in Ras Al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates on December 5: “An average person consumes energy equal to 800 kg of oil equivalent per year. 95% of all high conversion goods are manufactured using products of oil and gas processing. Today there are more than 60,000 power plants operating around the world, which provide energy to more than six billion people. Our planet’s roads carry one and a half billion cars every day, and 98% of those run on traditional fuels.”

In other words, even if Obama and McCain’s magic battery – more mythical than the fabled Power Battery of Oa that fueled the wonderful rings of the Green Lantern Corps in the science fiction comics I devoured in my youth – were to be wonderfully created, oil and coal would remain essential fuels to run the industries, process the food, heat the homes, and otherwise serve and protect the lives of at least six billion human beings around the world.

Why is this? Sechin again coolly and sensibly explains: “The use of fossil fuel yields much higher investment efficiency measured in energy units. By this measure, coal and gas-fired power plants (energy return on investment being 30 and 28 times) are more than 10 times more effective than subsidized wind and solar electricity (energy return on investment being about 4 and 2 times).”

Further, “Today energy demand is growing in developing countries where 750 million people still have no access to electricity at all. At the same time, in the US, energy consumption per capita is three and a half times higher than average consumption on the planet and 10 times higher than in India. And demand per capita in Europe exceeds the same indicator in Africa by almost 10 times.” Therefore, “in order to raise the standard of living in developing countries to at least half of the level of the ‘golden billion,’ oil production will have to increase almost twofold.”

The import of these cold, rational, accurate figures is epochal: They confirm that the current energy policies of Russia, China, and India are responsible, moral, and dedicated to the well-being, survival, and improvement in the standard of living of their populations and those of all the developing societies around the world. They also reveal that the “pure green,” anti-industrial carbon-emission-obsessed fanaticism now embraced by the ruling elites of Western Europe and North American are suicidal, certain to impoverish at least a billion previously prosperous people in the West and crush the vast still submerged mass of six billion more across the Global South in a morass of despair, grinding poverty, and rapid extinction.

Therefore, it is the self-proclaimed Pure and Virtuous, pursuing their crazed mirage of an oil-free future beyond the Setting Sun in the Land of Oz (which is neither Kansas, as in the famous fairy story, nor Australia) who are the true Forces of Darkness. They indeed are Dostoyevsky’s Devils, proclaiming their own righteousness as they inflict untold suffering and extinction on the human race.

The young Judy Garland who sang, “Somewhere, Over the Rainbow” in the 1939 Hollywood fairytale “The Wizard Oz” is long since dead. Live With It.

For oil is, indeed, essential for all the key aspects of sustainable, civilized life for the human race. And it is going to remain so, regardless of what fuels exist to power automobiles or even the electricity generating power plants of the world, just as Sechin said.

Thirteen years ago, I pointed out this basic Inconvenient Truth in my 2012 book, That Should Still Be Us: How Thomas Friedman’s Flat World Myths Are Keeping Us Flat on Our Backs – a work so toxic that not a single review of it, even any contemptuous one, was permitted to run anywhere in the supposedly free and open media of the United States and Britain.

“The cold, clear truth is that our need for oil isn’t going to go away,” I wrote. “Not for decades, probably not for generations: Possibly not ever. That is because we desperately need oil to produce the organic chemicals required to make many pharmaceuticals. You want to live in a world without oil? Then get ready for a world without ibuprofen as well.” Oil is essential to make such things as plastics and medical supplies. “If you want to live in an oil free world,” I continued, “be prepared to give up all your plastics. And prepare yourself to see the axing of half the trees in North America.” Furthermore, I added, oil is essential to grow food. It is the ultimate reason why today, most of the 8 plus billion on the earth eat far better than less than 1 billion did 200 years ago.

That extraordinary achievement is because of three men. (I regret to say – all of them were male, heterosexual, white, not Asian, not black, and certainly none of them were transgender.) Their names were Norman Borlaug, Fritz Haber, and Carl Bosch. Borlaug ‘s famous “miracle” rice and grain strains created the global Green Revolution. It multiplied the food output across the world many times. But those crops required enormous inputs of nitrate fertilizers. And these had to be made through the Haber-Bosch process of successfully drawing nitrogen from the atmosphere and converting it into limitless quantities of nitrate fertilizer. And that process, which won both Haber and Bosch the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, requires enormous inputs of oil.

Here then, is the bottom line of the great global energy debate of the 21st century: Do you want modern medicine and pharmaceuticals? Then you need oil. Do you want plastics and hygienic containers to protect food and guard against infection and disease? Again, you are going to need oil. Do you want smartphones, high tech processing, and the technologies to produce the wiring printed circuits, nanotechnology, and machine tools to provide them on demand? Again, you are going to need infinite quantities of oil. Most of all, do you want to see untold billions of innocent human beings starve to death in despair with their babies and children? If you do want to prevent that apocalypse from coming to pass, then you are going to need oil, oil, and yet more oil. More oil than you can possibly imagine.

That is the bottom line. As former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, herself a rigorously trained and successful research scientist, liked to say, There Is No Alternative.