Public Land is for the Public Good and not for Retrieving Sunken Costs

In Climate Move, Administration to Halt New Coal Mining Leases on Public Lands is an off kilter way of announcing the production slowdown of a product nobody wants. Fracked natural gas is normally cheaper than coal, but if you make available public lands to strip mine at a fraction of its historical value you can make coal cheap enough to compete, but for what purpose?  To keep a few people employed wielding giant machines that destroys the land? The analysis of energy production requires a rigorous examination of all costs to determine the greater good.  Coal fails miserably in comparison to gas, when considering the scarred land and despoiling rivers of ash that utilities gather after burning.

Another example of Public Land spoiled for a mind bogglingly awful result is Canada's money losing and energy consuming coal tar sands projects scarring its land and polluting our air yet which still operate because private interests lack the courage to admit the sunken costs are irretrievable.

Monday January 18 note:  The pain of denial has reached a point where the price is $8 a barrel for Canadian Tar Sands Crude with a trend for producers having to pay for the crude they produce to be taken away. 

Waiting to Flip the Switch

The Sierra Club doesn’t appreciate what fracking, a free market energy solution, is doing for its cause to clean and preserve our environment. Germany for example is lauded for its government sponsored green energy policy favoring solar and wind, but unfortunately for our atmosphere they rely on dirty coal to take care of the intermittency problem when the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow to the point where they did not make  their CO2 emissions goals of the past two years while contributing to the scar making mountaintop scraping coal mining machine. The U.S. on the other hand finds itself as the world’s leader in the reduction CO2 emissions these past few years and before the supposed onerous EPA utility emissions regulations are to take effect. This reduction come from power plant converting to gas from coal purely for the fact that it’s cheaper!

Today’s New York Times article in its business section describes how U.S. energy companies are now setting up their fracked wells as underground storage tanks to be turned on and off as the price of energy dictates.  This market flexibility means the death knell to long term hard to turn on and off projects such as Canada’s oil tar sands and Arctic Ocean oil exploration and drilling. Apparently fracking is the gift that keeps on giving unintended victories to the Sierra Club.