Crude: The Real Price of Oil--anyone seen this?

[jayman]

Originally Posted by hill

I wasn't aware of the oil production deaths / illness / environmental destruction there in South America .

I was.

It's one of those dirty little secrets, like skid marks on underwear, that everybody is aware of or at least SHOULD be aware of. It's self-obvious

If you thought that was a downer, I guess I shouldn't tell you what happens when these do-gooder recycling programs round up used electronics.

Following The Trail Of Toxic E-Waste - 60 Minutes - CBS News

Toxic Trade News

I find it amusing how we in North America pretend to be so clean, "green," and holier than thou. As I have stated previously, the REAL reason we outsourced and offshored our energy and electronics was to DUMP the emissions problem onto some other country, far away from ours

You have to admit, that scheme worked pretty good. We can sit on our big lazy butts here, smug and confident that we're so "green" when we are killing people half a world away

Doesn't matter if you point a rifle and drop the person, or force them to drink water laced with cyanide and arsenic, PAH's, etc, you still kill them

[MarinJohn]

Originally Posted by TonyPSchaefer

- The U.S. outsources more and more production and manufacturing to China every year.
- China has dedicated themselves to build one new coal-fired power plant each week for five years.
- Air pollution in the U.S. is declining in most major cities by measurable amounts."

It's so easy to see that we are outsourcing our work and our pollution. We're not reducing pollution; we're offshoring it.

Tony you're onto something here. Since the US has more coal than God, we finally can EXPORT it to China to help balance the trade deficit. After all, they'll still be burning coal whether or not we sell it to them, they'll still have all that coal pollution (which eventually blows to the US anyway), and we could fill all those ships going back empty to China after they dump all their cheap goodies here, thereby making use of the ongoing ship pollution. We could level mountaintops making more room for building WITH VIEWS, and we could still maintain our superior attitude!

[DaveinOlyWA]

exporting coal is almost not an option. "Big Coal" a book i read discusses the sheer bulk of coal and the difficulties we encounter now since most of the coal now comes from Montana and most of it is burned in the East (the West has luckily not adopted Coal to the same extent)

unlike oil its density to energy ratio is not all that great.

besides, one of the big reason China is building so many coal plants is because they have plenty of it as well

[jayman]

China is sitting pretty as far as coal reserves are concerned. Russia, and the USA, have the most proven coal reserves

[tripp]

China does have to import a lot of coal, mostly from Oz, I think. At the rate that they're building coal fired power plants, they will vapourize their coal reserves in about 80 years. If I recall, the US has by far the largest coal reserves in the world, about double that of the second nation, which is China, I believe. The article I read (can't remember the source) said that the US has about 30% of world reserves and China about 15%.

[jayman]

China imports coal as they can get sweet deals on the stuff

China March coal imports jump to record high

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/coal.html

Not due to any outright shortage of coal within their country

Asian countries are also investing heavily in research in the Canadian Arctic, to tap the large reserves of methane clathrate

[DaveinOlyWA]

US coal reserves are largely like US oil reserves. we have it, but not likely to get it.

a lot of this stuff lies under national parks, monuments and major population areas. Coal is currently still available in largely unpopulated areas but that does not excuse what has to be done to get the stuff out of the ground.

now whether the old email urban legend about an oil discovery that is supposed to be three times the size of the entire middle east sitting right here in the good old US of A that is not being tapped because its under ecologically sensitive government park land is true or not

well, dont care if its true or not. we simply cannot afford to burn what we have now.

[jayman]

It's not that the oil isn't available, its just that the cost of extraction is quite a bit higher than that stuff from the Mid East.

However, once you factor in the political crap involved in that mid east oil, our geologically-tight formations look pretty cheap to extract. Just not economical at <$70 a barrel