We Will Never Get Off Fossil Fuels

Robert Samuelson gives us some of the hard facts behind the our nation's reliance, past and future, on fossil fuels:

Just once, it would be nice if a president would level with Americans on energy. Barack Obama isn't that president. His speech the other night was about political damage control — his own. It was full of misinformation and mythology. Obama held out a gleaming vision of an America that would convert to the "clean" energy of, presumably, wind, solar and biomass. It isn't going to happen for many, many decades, if ever.

For starters, we won't soon end our "addiction to fossil fuels." Oil, coal and natural gas supply about 85 percent of America's energy needs. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects energy consumption to grow only an average of 0.5 percent annually from 2008 to 2035, but that's still a 14 percent cumulative increase. Fossil fuel usage would increase slightly in 2035 and its share would still account for 78 percent of the total.

Unless we shut down the economy, we need fossil fuels. More efficient light bulbs, energy-saving appliances, cars with higher gas mileage may all dampen energy use. But offsetting these savings will be more people (391 million vs. 305 million), more households (147 million vs. 113 million), more vehicles (297 million vs. 231 million) and a bigger economy (almost double in size). Although wind, solar and biomass are assumed to grow as much as 10 times faster than overall energy use, they provide only 11 percent of supply in 2035, up from 5 percent in 2008.

We're not going to get off fossil fuels, nor should we. We have more coal than we could possibly use, and if we would simply ramp up our nuclear power programs we could replace a great many oil-fired power plants and that would free up oil for our cars or other purposes. Solar and wind simply do not have the ability to replace fossil fuels in any significant amount. And most people will not be interested in electric cars until they come up with vehicles that have the range and quick recharging capacity to make them useful.

However, those electric cars will still require petroleum products for lubrication, tires, plastics, synthetic fabrics and other purposes.  Wind and solar aren't going to replace those things.