Comments about ‘Keep it in perspective’

Every energy source available to us has risks. We need to mitigate them as best we can, but we also need to realize that they will never be zero.

This situation points out the difficulties with doing cost/benefit in environmental matters and energy exploration. The costs of this accident are in fact incalculable. How does one do cost/benefit in the face of incalculable costs, no matter how small the chances of occurrence? Developing tools to calculate risks is a major challenge to ecology and especially environmental economics. Until we get the necessary analytic tools it is best to error on the side of caution. Wouldn't you agree?

How this oil rig could be so advanced as to have abowling alley yet not have mutiple shutoff valves is bewildering. If they said, "Sorry but all 5 shutoff valves failed in an increadible fluke I would have more sympathy for them. 1 stinking valve.

We went from drill, baby drill to drill, maybe not in a couple days. Politicians are falling over themselves to get to a microphone to tell us how important the california coast or jersey shore is. I've made peace with it, and in the case of utah oil shale dig, baby dig! We've made it abundantly clear we're not going to give up on oil, or even give an inch toward conservation. So, let's be realistic as to what that means on the supply side. And get rid of the fairweather politicians with shorelines.

The point of calculating and then taking risks is you can live with the cost of the risk. Energy production is not risk free but we shouldn't be taking risks we can't live with and, offshore drilling just may be one of those risks. The destruction of entire sections of an industry and the long term fouling of a significant part of our country not to mention the direct money costs is an enormously high cost to pay.

You are so correct. We need our oil. It is the driver of our economy. It is the entire basis of our transportation system. Alternative fuels are not going to be practical for a long time. Even then alternatives will not have the energy advantages of oil. An occasional leak is well worth the benefit.

$4k worth of solar panels could power an electric car for at least 30 years. And you wouldn't be supporting terrosits with your money.

It's very difficult to comprehend, let alone make policy decisions about, enterprises with very low probabilities of very high magnitude risks, such as nuclear power, offshore and arctic oil drilling, financial derivatives, etc. Such systems need to be built with multiply redundant failsafes. These were clearly missing in the current case.

We have understood the economic, social, and environmental costs of a petroleum-based economy for decades and paid lip service to weaning ourselves from oil for the same period (last night Rachel Maddow ran a series of clips of every president since Nixon agreeing on that point). This editorial is more of the same.

I remember how Prudhoe Bay and the Alaska pipeline were sold as our bridge to the post-petroleum future back in the 1970s (just one more drink, I'll sober up tomorrow). Now it's ANWR and the Lower 48 coastlines. I know we have a technological, energy-dependent society, but if the Gulf spill doesn't motivate a serious shift towards decentralized, human-scaled alternatives, then we are genuinely stupid. At least when a residential solar system catastrophically fails, a single family is inconvenienced. It doesn't devastate an entire region's economy.

Justify all you need to fill your addiction, leave nothing but scorched earth.
Strip mine Utah's beauty for a temporary "fix" awe isn't that better.
Your children's children won't mind that you not only destroyed and made inhabitable the land and sea, but used up all vestiges of non-renewable energy so you could play video games and watch movies consume and spend and do it again. You Folks remind me of junkies stealing from their child's piggy bank to buy one more fix, awe...

...and thank you GOP for protecting big oil with that 70 million cap. Personal responsibility is for the persons, Not Corp's.?

"Like a lizard in the sun take as much as you need there's enough for everyone."
Solar Energy will prevail when the "Old" ideas of digging for energy are buried.

Revelations 14

All nations are drunk on the wine of Babylon.
(the Middle East)

...addicted, as in; will do anything to get it, can't live withour it, lie, cheat, steal, invade, commit wars for it....


....[OIL]....

Re-read it now,
It will make the scriptures come alive...

"All electric" cars are an option. They are already in production and can go up to 125 miles on a single charge, far more than ninety percent of Americans would typically travel in a day. Long trips are a problem though not yet surmounted satisfactorily. The electric engine has very few moving parts (five I think) compared to the internal combustion engine.

For all the government talk of alternative energy they don't seem to me that serious when it comes to private transport. All we have so far is ten percent ethanol in gasoline and rather expensive hybrid vehicles.

I don't know but I wonder: what happened to natural gas vehicles? We're not exactly inundated with them, and all electric cars are not being aggressively promoted by government.

They like windmills and solar panels; a bit unreliable but so far so good. The Feds don't seem excited about Utah shale or the use of effluence fuel. Rightly or wrongly I have a marked impression that the government are more interested in telling us what we can't do than encouraging alternative car engines. They seem to prefer exorbitantly priced gasoline.

To LDS Lib.

While I agree with your point, the scriptures can be used to support anything.

This has nothing to do with scriptures and neither will the fix.

"Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.

It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.

We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.

We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us."

Jimmy Carter April 18, 1977

After Cater left the White House in an act that would define America's future, Ronald Reagan had the solar panels removed from the roof of the White House.

JoeBlow | 9:29 a.m.
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I didn't say it was, or wasn't.

I'm just saying open your eyes and unstop your ears.

Always keep and "open-mind".

Look at ALL the possibilities.

I just happen to believe there's always more than meets the eye.

I learned in "liberal" college to take nothing at face value, and always question authority.

potpourri | 9:27 a.m. May 5, 2010:
"Long trips are a problem though not yet surmounted satisfactorily."
Trains, intermodal, rent a car at your destination... We need to get out of the mode of thinking that a single vehicle has to do everything.

"All we have so far is ten percent ethanol in gasoline and rather expensive hybrid vehicles."
A sop to the Corn Belt. If Iowa didn't have the first presidential primary, we might have a better energy policy.

"The Feds don't seem excited about Utah shale or the use of effluence fuel."
Barring some grand technology innovation, I think oil shale will continue to run a net energy deficit for a long time-- Btu input greater than Btu yield (especially if the energy costs of needed infrastructure, water development, land reclamation, etc. are included in the calculation).

Not_Scared | 9:40 a.m. May 5, 2010:
"After Cater left the White House in an act that would define America's future, Ronald Reagan had the solar panels removed from the roof of the White House."

Ironically, Carter is disdained by many on the right as the "malaise" president, yet his message, symbolized by the solar panel, was the upbeat one of Can Do, tapping homegrown American ingenuity to solve our problems. Reagan, on the other hand, surrendered to the status quo and rolled over for the recalcitrant auto and oil industries, yet is revered as the optimistic leader. Meanwhile, as Thomas Friedman often points out, America largely ceded the alternative energy sector to Europe and China, leaving us to play catch up now.

The sun is an ongoing source of energy, yet so little has been done to make use of it. Eleven men died as a result of this accident; has anyone ever been killed as a result of harnessed solar power?

attentive | 12:36 p.m. May 5, 2010:
"Eleven men died as a result of this accident; has anyone ever been killed as a result of harnessed solar power?"
Well, there's the story (probably apocryphal) that Archimedes designed a parabolic solar reflector device to destroy enemy ships during the seige of Syracuse (c. 214-212 BCE), but we get your point. I suppose one could take the geologic perspective and argue that the drill rig explosion WAS harnessed solar power, since all fossil fuel energy ultimately originated from photosynthesis.

On solar energy:

Solar calculators are the only obvious benefit in my life: they are great. Finally portable electronic devices something not requiring battery after battery, or constant recharging.

Solar panels are expensive at the moment it seems to me. One company offered to supply hot water with one medium sized solar panel that would do nothing other than provide hot water. The pamphlet showed a woman washing her hair in the shower. Big deal. It cost us only a dollar a day for all our gas needs includig hot water. The solar company wanted to charge $6,000 for hot water only.

I have often priced solar energy systems but, even with government incentives, they are out of reach to the vast majority and not a great value. I can't help thinking that could be different, that there must be some way of making these things more affordable. Again how serious is the government about real change other than threatening restrictions on energy usage and threatening more and higher taxes.? What use are most politicians?

To attentive: People could die from solar power if they needed power when the sun wasn't shining. MIT has done some promising research on storing solar enery, but commercial applications are several years off.