The Democratic Party may yet succeed in choking the life out of the shale-oil industry, but if that's what the
Saudis were trying to do, it's back-fired:
Khalid Alsweilem, a former official at the Saudi central bank and now at Harvard University, . . . wrote in a Harvard report that Saudi Arabia would have an extra trillion of assets by now if it had adopted the Norwegian model of a sovereign wealth fund to recyle the money instead of treating it as a piggy bank for the finance ministry. The report has caused [a] storm in Riyadh.
"We were lucky before because the oil price recovered in time. But we can't count on that again," he said.
OPEC have left matters too late, though perhaps there is little they could have done to combat the advances of American technology.
In hindsight, it was a strategic error to hold prices so high, for so long, allowing shale frackers - and the solar industry - to come of age. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle.
That's a funny aside about allowing solar to "come of age," though. I'm afraid that genie has only begun to think of peeking over the edge of the bottle.
3 comments:
Lot of hydrocarbon-originated energy goes into the making of a solar cell.
What's the carbon footprint of a solar cell, and what's the payback period before that footprint gets amortized over the lifetime of the cell (assuming the EPA even allows amortization of a carbon footprint) to within the latest EPA limit for an electricity-generating power plant?
As to the EPA and the Dems' assault on cheap energy, it'll be interesting to see whether a Republican administration and Congress will eliminate that assault. With extreme prejudice.
Eric Hines
In the early 90s, actions taken by OPEC, etc., damaged the primary economies of Colorado and other Western states that had oil production as their primary drivers.
This time it's our own government that is imposing regulatory burdens (with unproven benefit) designed to destroy the coal-mining industry that contributes substantially to the economies of several states, e.g., West Virginia, Wyoming.
It's one thing to experience deliberate economic impairment from foreign hostile activity; it's quite another thing when it's domestic.
If they combined Planned Profit's sustainability plan with human bio farming, solar would do better in the eyes of the world.
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