Oil - price projections, $90?! and what's next
This entry was posted on 10/21/2007 11:30 PM and is filed under Tax Shifting,Dept. of Energy,Global Peak Oil,OIL,Wasted resources,Economy.
In May 2007, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (part of the Department of Energy) projected that worst case world oil prices would hit $90/barrel sometime after 2015 (page 30, graph on bottom right).
Bummer --- we hit $90 last week (October 2007).
Here's some more bad, but widely known, news. The world is using about 86 million barrels of oil per day now; this figure is expected to be at least 97 million barrels of oil per day in 2015. An increase of 13% in just 8 years.
If supplies are this tight and prices this high now, very scary to think what prices will be in 2015. The U.S. consumes just over 10% of the world's daily total. A sad fact - a large percentage of this is wasted because energy is so inexpensive in the U.S.
We should use this period before the upcoming energy price skyrocket to do the best thing we can - reduce our use of non-renewable energy. The best way to do this? A phased-in federal tax shift from income to non-renewable energy. The tax on energy should be a BTU tax based on the non-renewable fuel's energy content. This will ensure that nuclear power and fossil fuels begin to include their EXTERNAL COSTS. These external costs include the pollution and waste they generate and the fact that they are non-renewable. Why wait for the market to signal this -- why not "soften the blow" by shifting taxes to non-renewable energy now?? (The market is beginning to signal us.) And, no, the billions in the nuclear waste fund will not cover the costs of nuclear waste storage (from a solve4biggies comment under the entry - Stop the madness):
"From the National Academy of Engineering - a Fall 2003 article Will the United States Need a Second Geologic Repository? Yes - 'The NWPA limits the capacity of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository to 63,000 MT of initial heavy metal in commercial spent fuel.5 The 103 U.S. commercial reactors currently operating will produce this quantity of spent fuel by 2014.' That's a problem."
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So, we need to use the fossil fuels we have at a slower rate, and the best way to do this is to have oil cost more, yet YOUR INCOME IS BEING TAXED TO SUBSIDIZE THE OIL INDUSTRY. Sure there are efforts to reduce these (House & Senate).....but it there is significant debate about EVEN doing this. Having ANY subsidies is going to make future skyrocketing energy prices much worse because of our growing non-renewable energy dependence.
