Senator Sanders’ Energy Plan dazzles the reader. It promises to cut carbon pollution by 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050 by cutting fossil fuel subsidies, outlawing fracking, and other measures.
What would it mean to ban fracking; which is the injection of materials and liquids underground to gain access to new fields of oil and gas?
The United States would lose about one-half of its domestic oil production we banned fracking. We would have to increase our oil imports by 193 million gallons per day to meet current demand. blogs.wsj.com/...
GASOLINE PRICES COULD RISE
Our increased demand for foreign oil could certainly drive up prices, if we stopped fracking. Gas was about $3.50 a gallon just 5 years ago, compared to about $2 now. Sander’s plan to ban fracking could drive up gasoline prices by restricting supplies.
WE WOULD HAVE TO IMPORT BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF OIL
Our balance of payments could suffer a loss of about $80 billion a year, paying for that imported oil. We would pay those billions for oil to foreign countries, including our enemies and cruel dictatorships, rather than to workers in California, North Dakota, and elsewhere.
We can’t make up the difference with so-called alternative vehicle fuels. The Department of Energy has squandered billions of dollars on grants for biofuel refineries, several of which produced only trivial amounts of fuel, and in some case, no fuel at all.
Sanders promises large increase in miles/gallon fuel consumption for cars. That is a great idea and will help reduce use of oil for transportation, but we will still use billions of gallons of fuels for decades into the future.
Sanders proposes electric cars. I’m all for that.
However, less than 1% of our motor vehicles are currently electric cars. It will take decades to produce inexpensive electric cars in mass quantities, and to build the network of charging stations, and the hundreds of new power plants we’ll need to provide electricity for our vehicle fleet. In the meantime, is it a good idea to have to import billions of dollars of foreign oil, after curtailing fracking?
HOME GAS HEATING PRICES COULD RISE
Fracking also accounts for over half of our natural gas production. About 60 million US households use natural gas for space heating, water heating, cooking and clothes drying. Thanks to fracking, the price of residential gas has fallen to about one-half its price in 2007, saving tens of mlllions of households billions of dollars on their energy bills.
Will home energy bills for natural gas usage increase after Sanders bans fracking? How much?
What will the Sanders plan do about these tens of millions of home that already use highly efficient natural gas? Will millions of folks have to tear out/retrofit their gas space heaters, their water heaters and clothes driers and stoves?
Sanders brags about how Vermont has banned fracking. One consequence of that ban is that over 300,000 Vermont households must burn oil, rather than natural gas for heat, producing excessive carbon emissions compared to cleaner. more efficient natural gas.
Sanders also call for elimination of subsidies for fossil fuel usage. However, about 10 million homes in the US use oil or propane for home heating. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program provides about $3 billion/year in fossil fuel subsidies to protect low income home heating customers from price spikes, and most of those folks burn oil and propane. Does Sanders propose eliminating this subsidy? Does the Sanders Plan propose retrofitting these 10 million homes to convert them away from oil heating?
Germany provides a real-life model of what happens which an industrial society campaigns to massively reduce fossil fuel usage. Germany now generates roughly 1/3 of its electricity from renewable sources.
HOME ELECTRICITY PRICES COULD RISE
However, Germany’s energy consumers pay the highest prices in Europe, about 48% higher than its neighbors, and German prices have jumped 60% during the last five years. Germany has had to build several new lignite coal-fired power plants, using the dirtiest coal on the planet, to assure that the power grid remains reliable.
Will the Sanders energy plan drive up residential electricity rates, and if so how much? As much as Germany?
MORE WOOD-FIRED POWER PLANTS COULD POLLUTE THE AIR
Germany relies in large part on burning biomass to generate renewable energy. Sanders endorses burning biomass. In the US, that usually means burning wood. A wood-fired power plant produces several tons per day of toxic air pollution. In some ways it is dirtier than coal. Burning wood waste is only a carbon-neutral strategy if calculated over decades. The thousands of acres of cut-down trees will have be replanted and grown to maturity, before wood burning ceases to contribute to global warming.
How many new wood-burning power plants will be operated under the Sanders plan? How much air pollution will those spew? How many acres of forests will be cut down for power plant fuel?