Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
years, even as oil prices have soared. According to the International Energy Agency, world conven-
tional crude oil production peaked in 2006 and will taper off from now on.
ExxonMobil says this is nothing we should worry about, as there are still vast untapped hydro-
carbon reserves all over the world. That's true. But we have already harvested the low-hanging fruit
of our oil and gas endowment. The resources that remain are of lower quality and are located in
places that are harder to access than was the case for oil and gas in decades past. Oil and gas com-
panies are increasingly operating in ultra-deep water, or in arctic regions, and need to use sophistic-
ated technologies like hydrofracturing, horizontal drilling, and water or nitrogen injection. We have
entered the era of extreme hydrocarbons. This means that production costs will continue to escalate
year after year. Even if we get rid of oil market speculators, the price of oil will keep ratcheting
up anyway. And we know from recent economic history that soaring energy prices cause the eco-
nomy to wither: when consumers have to spend much more on gasoline, they have less to spend on
everything else.
But if investment costs for oil and gas exploration and extraction are increasing rapidly, the en-
vironmental costs of these fuels are ballooning just as quickly. With the industry operating at the
limits of its technical know-how, mistakes can and will happen. As we saw in the Gulf of Mexico in
the summer of 2010, mistakes that occur under a mile or two of ocean water can have devastating
consequences for an entire ecosystem, and for people who depend on that ecosystem. The citizens
of the Gulf coast are showing a brave face to the world and understandably want to believe their
seafood industry is safe and recovering, but biologists who work there tell us that oil from the Deep-
water Horizon disaster is still working its way up the food chain.
Of course the biggest environmental cost from burning fossil fuels comes from our chemical
alteration of the planetary atmosphere. Carbon dioxide from oil, gas, and coal combustion is chan-
ging Earth's climate and causing our oceans to acidify. The likely consequences are truly horrifying:
rising seas, extreme weather, falling agricultural output, and collapsing oceanic food chains. Never
mind starving polar bears—we're facing the prospect of starving people.
But wait: Is this even happening? Nearly half of all Americans tell pollsters they think either the
planet isn't warming at all, or, if it is, it's not because of fossil fuels. After all, how can the world
really be getting hotter when we're seeing record snowfalls in many places? And even if it
is
warm-
ing, how do we know that's not because of volcanoes, or natural climate variation, or cow farts, or
because the Sun is getting hotter? Americans are understandably confused by questions like these,
which they hear repeated again and again on radio and television.
Now of course, if you apply the critical thinking skills you've learned here at WPI to an ex-
amination of the relevant data, you'll probably come to the same conclusion as the overwhelming
majority of scientists who have studied these questions. Indeed, the scientific community is nearly
unanimous in assessing that the Earth
is
warming, and that the only credible explanation for this is
rising levels of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. That kind of consensus is hard to
achieve among scientists except when a conclusion is overwhelmingly supported by evidence.
I'm not out to demonize ExxonMobil, but some things have to be said. That company has played
a pivotal role in shaping our national conversation about climate change. A 2007 report from the
Union of Concerned Scientists described how ExxonMobil adopted the tobacco industry's disin-
formation tactics, and funded some of the same organizations that led campaigns against tobacco
regulation in the 1980s—but this time to cloud public understanding of climate change science and
delay action on the issue. According to the report, between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil funneled
