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Is Oil Evil?
Is your personal consumption of oil part of the problem?
| “ | You look at that river gently flowing by. You notice the leaves rustling with the wind. You hear the birds; you hear the tree frogs. In the distance you hear a cow. You feel the grass. The mud gives a little bit on the river bank. It’s quiet; it’s peaceful. And all of a sudden, it’s a gear shift inside you. And it’s like taking a deep breath and going, 'Oh yeah, I forgot about this'. | ” |
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— Al Gore in the opening monologue of An Inconvenient Truth
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At present stage of my life, I do not think that my personal consumption of oil is part of the problem at all. However, when I get older and start to drive a car my consumption will be part of the problem. Right now I barely ever use oil for myself. I suppose I am making it consumed by having my parents take me to and from school and to my sports. If I was just driving around to just go 'cruizing' that would be a direct problem of the limited amount of oil. Oil needs to be used in moderation. There is no way that our world can ever eliminate using oil for the fact that it is very helpful. The average use of Oil by each citizen of our country is especially significantly high than the average of the world. While there is a big need to educate every citizen in the world to use oil in moderation, it is much more essential that citizens of our country need to be educated in this aspect. In my opinion the public transportation should be encouraged and preferred over personal transportation. Alternate sources of energies should be developed rigourously and used even in essential areas like electricity genration and heating. Hybrid and fully electric vehicles should be promoted and the high oil consuming vehicles like SUVs, Humvees, Trucks should be regulated. The recent laws imposing higher fuel effieciency standards by the government is a very appropriate step int he right direction. I strongly believe that many of today's global problems like excessive green house gases, environmental pollution, ecological imbalance etc., are the side effects of my personal oil consumption. Apart from that my personal oil consumption makes our country depend on oil which makes us depend on many of the foreign nations and will engage us in several political and military conflicts forcing us to raise our defense budgets.
PT.2
2. What impact does oil have on our environment?
We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
Mead, Margaret
Oil has huge impact on our environment. These impacts are both good and bad. On the negative side the oil is tearing our atmosphere apart. The car emissions that run on oil greatly pollute the air and can completely ruin our environment. The extraction of oil from land and sea creates huge ecological imbalance in the land and water. During the transportation the oil spills cause significant damage to the natural life by polluting the water, land and air. The green house gauses from not only the automobiles but also from the factories due to burning of oil are one of the major cuases for the hole in the Ozone Layer. This in turn is contributing to the global warming causing the melting of the ice and snow on the globe and reducing the area of the land. The emissions raise the level of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the air causing impurities and pollution. The burning of oil in the factories produces the smoke into air with several harmfull contents causing undesirable effects such as acid rain and corrossion of buildings and structures.
The positive effect of oil is it helps us utilize the natural resources in the environment by running various equipment, machines and automobiles. The tools and vehicles used to fertilize the farms with crops almost always run on oil. This means that oil powered things help the crops be more useful. Also, the vehicles that are used to harvest the crops almost always run on oil. This means that with oil powering the harvesting vehicles we get more food from our environment. This situation in a way is negative to the environment but in the long run it is not because with the oil powered vehicles we can produce more than we take in. There for, we are producing more than we take in so there is in a way a net growth and that is positive.
PT.3
3. Are there any viable energy alternatives?
There MANY viable alternatives to oil energy sources which are being put into use nowadays. In some of the alternative sources of energy are very cost effective and envirnomental friendly when used in a proper way. Solar energy is very environmental friendly but has yet to be developed as a low cost solution. Hydroelectric is very cost effective and is already in use now. The fuel cell technology can use the hydrogen and oxygen in the air and can be harmless to the environment provided the technolgoy becomes affordable to the common man. Natural gas is already in use and is abandunt in nature but the affects envirnment as bad as the oil. Also there are non conventional sources like wind mills which use the wind power and are already in use. The sea wave power based technology is in use but is not very abundant. Also there are other natural resources from which we can derive energy like bio-gas and ethanol which is being explored by many of the agricultural nations like India and China.
Some of the examples are:
1. Thermal energy from coal
The thermal energy extracted by burning coal is used to generate electricity in a thermal power plant.
A thermal power plant is an energy conversion center that burns coal and other fossil fuels to produce electricity, designed on a large scale for continuous operation.
2. Solar Energy
3. Natural Gas
4. Hydro Electricity
5. Wind Power
Wind power is another alternative energy source that could be used without producing by-products that are harmful to nature. The fins of a windmill rotate in a vertical plane which is kept perpendicular to the wind by means of a tail fin. As wind flow crosses the blades of the windmill, it is forced to rotate and can be used to generate electricity. Another type of wind power generator is the two hollow half-drum-type wind collectors. This wind collector rotates in a single vertical axis, making this device independent of the wind direction, which may generate more electricity. Like solar power, harnessing the wind is highly dependent upon weather and location. The average wind velocity of Earth is around 9 m/sec. And the power that could be produced when a wind mill is facing the wind of 10 mi/hr. is around 50 watts.
6. Water Wave Power
Hydroelectricity comes from the damming of rivers and utilizing the potential energy stored in the water. As the water stored behind a dam is released at high pressure, its kinetic energy is transferred onto turbine blades and used to generate electricity. This system has enormous costs up front, but has relatively low maintenance costs and provides power quite cheaply. In the United States approximately 180,000 MW of hydroelectric power potential is available, and about a third of that is currently being harnessed.
7. Bio-Gas
8. Fuel Cells
9. Hydrogen
Image. Nanotubes have produced hydrogen gas by using the energy from UV sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. This goal is to replace fossil fuel economy with a hydrogen fuel economy.
10.Atomic Energy
11. Methane
12.Ethanol from agricultural products
This video from YouTube shows many examples of alternate sources for energy.
Here is the the basic breakdown of current energy sources in the world:
- Fossil Fuel (Oil, Coal, Gas): 75%
- Renewables (Biomass, Hydro, Solar, Wind, etc.): 19%
- Nuclear: 6%
The following chart shows the sources of alternate energies graphically:
T
PT. 4
4. Is there a connection between oil and violence in the Middle East?
For greed all nature is too little.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Carpet bombing, roadside bomb, suicide bombing, hijacking, assasinations, secret prisons, torture, waterboarding. Whenever you hear these words these days, it immediately gives signal in the back of our minds that it is something about the middle east. And whenever we think of middle east a three letter word strikes our mind immediately, "oil". Yes there is a strong connection between the oil and the violence in the Middle East. I personally think that oil is the first of the two major reasons for the violence in the Middle East. The second major reason being the Arab-Israil political conflict. There are other socio-economic reasons for the violence in the Middle East but those are minor. There are several facts supporting this theory. First and foremost reason to believe in this, is the simple fact that our country US is the biggest player in these conflicts. US is the biggest consumer of the oil in the world and middle east region is the biggest producer of oil in the world. If you look at the history and compare the times before and after the discovery of oil in the middle east, mainly before 1970 and after 1970, you will find a clear difference in the source and kind of conflict and amount of violence in the middle east. Prior to the discovery of oil the cause of conlict was only the issue of Israel and the wars were fought between Israel and Arab Nations only. US was only supporting Israel but not directly involved. None of the world nations were involved in those wars, except for minor involvement of Russia because of its cold war with US. But if you look at the wars after the discovery of the oil, the scene is totally different. All the major developed nations of the world are involved directly. The very simple reason is every nation has its own need for oil and has strategic interest in those regions. Whether you take the Iran-Iraq war or the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq or the first gulf war of in 1991 or the second gulf war in 2003, the only reason apparent is the greed to control the oil in this area. Kuwait is a very oil rich country and Saddam wanted to control the oil prices, so he attacked Kuwait. Kuwait was a major supplier of oil to US and other developed nations. So they formed a coalition under the leadership of US and attacked Iraq to drive it away from Kuwait. What followed was a decade of "sanctions" resulting in a weakened Hussein regime, and the deaths of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqi children - for want of food, of safe drinking water, and of basic medications. After a decade, US and other developed nations attacked Iraq bringing down Saddam's regime under the pretext of Weapons of Mass Destruction(WMD). Half a decade has passed after the invasion not even a single WMD is found making it obvious that the only reason to attack Iraq was to control its oil resources and to control the whole middle east by building a strong hold there. Clearly the day to day violence we hear in the news by the local people of middle east against the coalition forces, be it the car bombings or suicide bombings is nothing but a fight of the local people to regain the control of their lost reosurces. Very obviously it is in response to the violence and attrocities done by the coalition forces using their Weapons of Mass Destruction against the people of middle east be it the carpet bombings using B-12 bomber planes or the precision strikes of the F-17 striker planes. There is a very strong reason to believe that, had there been no oil in the middle east there would have been no violence at all that we have been seeing over the past couple of decades.
A US soldier gaurding the Iraqi oil refinery.
Sources:
- An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore, Ex Vice President
- www.energyaction.net
- Alternative Energy Demystified by Stan Gibilisco
- Time: Global Warming: The Causes, the Perils, the Politics - and What It Means for You by Editors of Time Magazine
- www.energybulletin.net
- Energy Intelligence Group, June 15, 2006; BBC News, Dec. 1, 2005.
Contributors:
Tyler W. (Q. 1-2)
Amir B. (Q. 3-4)
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