Yesterday I attended the unconventional fuels conference organized by the Institute of Clean and Secure Energy (ICSE) of the University of Utah. This Institute should better be named "Institute of Dirty and Dangerous Energy" because it researches "clean" ways of mining and burning fossil fuels.
Utah is the epicenter of tar sands and oil shale development in the USA. (I wish they would try to be the epicenter for solar and geothermal, but they have found a different area where to excel.) The State of Utah has an employee with the title "manager of unconventional energy development", whose job is to help everyone working in unconventional energy in Utah. He is joking that his job could be called the most unconventional state job in the USA because no other state has such a position. One of my research goals when attending the conference was to understand better what the scientists, business people, and state employees promoting tar sands and oil shale do so that they can sleep at night. Because these people are of course smart enough to know that what they are doing is making the planet inhospitable for future generations. Here are 5 strategies: (1) The main strategy was not to talk about it, leave it out as the big elephant in the room. For instance geochemist David Pershing, a member of the ICSE who just recently has become President of the University of Utah, expressed how happy he was about the ICSE. He did mention the environment, he said it was one of their core concerns, namely (a) contamination of aquifers (b) seismic issues Obviously he was referring to the well known issues of fracking. When asked about the main environmental issue, global warming, he said that natural gas has a lower carbon footprint than coal. He ignored recent literature according to which this is far from certain due to fugitive emissions of methane, and he also did not mention that tar sands and oil shale have much higher carbon footprint than coal. One firm which does oil shale says that the carbon footprint of their method has a lower carbon footprint than other methods. This is the second denial strategy, namely (2) find someone who is even worse. (3) The entire conference was part of their denial strategy. The conference had the explicit purpose to open the work of the ICSE to public discussion. They said they welcomed the comments of people concerned about what they are doing, and I believe that they meant it. In this way they can redefine the global warming issue as a matter of debate and tell themselves they are open to debate. (4) They even used the argument that Utah is too little to matter. Responding to the question whether they were afraid that Utah would experience similar social and environmental disruptions as Alberta, the answer was that Utah tar sands is only 1% of the extent of the Alberta tar sands. This person conveniently forgot to say that the energy content of Utah Oil shale is about 100 times that of Utah tar sands. Oil shale is the big price businesses are lusting for in Utah, not tar sands. Tar sands is basically a playground for small businesses, with those who manage to develop a viable procedure hoping to be snapped up by one of the big oil companies. (5) In a personal conversation with someone at the ICSE I said: the problem is that you get all the money, much more than the institutes for renewable energy which also exist at the U. His answer was that all the good researchers were going to the renewable energy research, and a good researcher is worth much more than money. I.e., the pariah status itself of this kind of research is now used as an argument so that they don't have to see themselves as prostitutes of destructive economic interests. These are the thought processes so that people can justify making big sums of money or accepting big grants for doing something which is destructive of our future. Nobody wants to say "no" when offered such an "opportunity." It is fairly universal, they all think and say pretty much the same thing, i.e., they have learned from each other how to navigate this dilemma. When someone comes up with an especially eloquent excuse there is general applause. Hans _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
