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| On Earth Day we should celebrate the fact that there is plenty of affordable fossile energy - like shale gas - for us to use |
We’re coming up on Earth Day this Sunday, and it might be a good time to celebrate the fact that we still get most of our plentiful, affordable energy directly from Mother Earth in the form of fossil fuels (coal, natural gas and petroleum) that helps to fuel our vehicles and airplanes, and heat and light our homes, businesses and factories. Shouldn’t that be part of the “awareness and appreciation of Earth’s natural environment,” to celebrate the Earth’s bountiful natural resources in the form of fossil fuels?
The two charts above illustrate the fact that despite Obama’s claims that oil and fossil fuels are “energy sources of the past,” they are still very much the primary energy sources for both domestic production and consumption (EIA data here) of energy, and will likely remain so for many generations to come. Despite all of the billions of dollars in government taxpayer subsidies of renewable energy, they provided only 9.3% of energy consumption in 2011, which was barely more than the 8.9% share in 1983, almost 30 years ago – that’s not a lot of progress for the politically popular renewables. And when it comes to solar and wind, together combined they provided only 1.6% of the total energy produced in the U.S. in 2011 – an almost insignificant amount. Given the abundance of shale oil and gas in the U.S. it’s highly likely that fossil fuels will continue to fuel our economy and continue to be our dependable, affordable “fuels of the future.”
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On Earth Day, we should also celebrate the fact that extracting oil and gas from the earth creates thousands of jobs for Americans. We now have more direct jobs in the domestic oil and gas industry (193,000) than at any time since 1988, and the industry has been creating more than 100 new jobs every day for the last year.
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