on Discovery Channel

aired this weekend: Addicted To Oil: Thomas L. Friedman Reporting
Mr. Friedman points out that cars use up most of the oil we import. He emphasizes foreign oil dependency as the immediate problem, as it fosters tyrannies, especially those who would do us harm.

He interviews Amory Lovins, who argues that further efficiencies can help us wean ourselves from dependency, while ethanol from switchgrass can do the rest. Another person argues that wind energy can provide us with one-half of the electricity we use. These arguments are highly questionable.

See also Thomas Friedman on Charlie Rose and the Year earlier discussion with Thomas Friedman on subject


coming up July 16 on the Discovery Channel:
Global Warming: What You Need to Know, with Tom Brokaw

More doomsaying

Under the title, Fly Now - Stay Later, the quarterly glossy magazine 111, printed in Palm Springs, California, includes this reprinted interview with 'doomsaying' author James Howard Kunstler. See an excerpt from his book, The Long Emergency.
Also from that Environment Advocacy Ezine, Grist, is an article on biofuels, The Scheme of the Crop.

Running Out, a Myth?

from John Stossel's web page:

MYTH: We are running out of oil
TRUTH: Not so fast!
"It's going to be a catastrophe!"
When they're not complaining about the price of gas, doomsayers would have us believe that we are burning oil at an "unsustainable" rate.

How can anyone honestly argue otherwise? In this video interview with Peter Huber, co-author of The Bottomless Well, Mr. Stossel asks the right questions such as: Isn't oil finite? Somehow, the answers are unconvincing.

Mr. Stossel goes on to argue:

If the price of a barrel of oil stays high, lots of entrepreneurs will scramble for ways to supply cheaper energy. They'll come up with alternative energy sources or better ways to suck oil out of the ground. At fifty dollars a barrel, it's even profitable to recover oil that's stuck in the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Peter Huber and Mark Mills point out in their book The Bottomless Well that those tar sands alone contain enough oil to meet our needs for a hundred years.

But the media don't pay much attention to that. Not running out of oil is not a very interesting story.

As usual, everyone gets sidetracked by the present (cheap fuel) dollar cost to extract oil, but doesn't figure the actual energy cost to capture further energy, whether tar sands, ethanol or solar.

In another 20/20 piece, Mr. Stossel counts down to two more of his myths related to oil:
MYTH #2-- Urban Sprawl Is Ruining America and
MYTH #1-- Sharing Would Make the World a Better Place.
In that last, he alludes to The Tragedy of the Commons. See my blog entry on this.

Here's how one reviewer characterizes Mr. Stossel's Myths book:

From Publishers Weekly
ABC News correspondent Stossel mines his 20/20 segments for often engaging, frequently tendentious challenges to conventional wisdom, presenting a series of "myths" and then deploying an investigative journalism shovel to unearth "truth." This results in snappy debunkings of alarmism, ...The author's complacent glosses on overpopulation and global warming ("we can build dykes and move back from the coasts") are especially glib and one-sided.