Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper
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America’s energy riches are enormous, and they are increasing thanks to the shale gale, which has fundamentally altered the global industrial balance of power. European and Asian companies are investing tens of billions of dollars in the United States because it has cheap energy. For instance, between 2008 and 2012, foreign companies invested more than $26 billion in the US oil and gas sector.38
The shale gale has transformed the US gas sector and turned it from a prospective natural gas importer to an exporter of the fuel. Thanks to the shale gale, the nation now has a price advantage for natural gas that is second to no other country on the planet, with the possible exception of Qatar. Over the past two years or so, US natural gas prices—measured at the Henry Hub in Louisiana—have averaged about $4 or less per million BTU. In the European Union, that same 1 million BTUs of gas will cost three to four times as much. In Japan, it will cost about five times as much.39
Cheaper energy has led foreign companies to invest in industrial facilities in the United States. To cite just two examples: an Egyptian company, Orascom, began construction in 2013 on a new $1.8 billion fertilizer plant in Iowa;40 in June 2013, Vallourec, a French company, opened a new steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio, a Rust Belt town where many of its industrial jobs evaporated over the past few decades. Vallourec’s investment in the new steel mill: $1.1 billion.41
The United States has cheap gas because it leads the world in production of natural gas—and not by a little bit. In 2012, the United States produced 66 billion cubic feet of gas per day42—nearly as much gas as all of the Middle East and all of Africa combined. (The 2012 numbers for the Middle East: 52.9 Bcf/d, and Africa: 20.9 Bcf/d.)43
What about oil? The United States is leading in that fuel, too. Thanks to the shale gale, US oil production, which has been falling for decades, is suddenly rising, and rapidly. In 2013, production rose by about 1 million barrels per day.44 The production gains are so dramatic that the United States could soon eclipse both Russia and Saudi Arabia in daily oil production.
America dominates oil and natural gas production because it dominates the global drilling business. That domination has ripple effects throughout the economy, into the railroad, steel, sand, cement, fast food, fuel, trucking, and tire markets, to name just a few. Furthermore, America’s dominance will continue for at least a decade to come, and perhaps much longer.
Why? The United States has the rigs, the rednecks, and the pipes.
Shale is the most abundant form of sedimentary rock on the planet.45 In June 2013, the Energy Information Administration revised its estimates of global shale gas resources. The new estimate: the world has some 23,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas available in shale deposits. China, Argentina, Algeria, Canada, Mexico, and Australia all have huge shale gas (and shale oil) resources.46 Those countries, and others, should eventually be able to copy the US model of shale gas production. But other countries are light-years behind when it comes to developing their own shale deposits, mainly because those countries don’t have the rigs needed to develop their shale resources. The United States does.
At any one time, more than half of all the drill rigs on the planet are operating in the United States; in mid-2013, for instance, the US had about 1,750 active rigs. The rest of the world combined had about 1,500.47 That abundance of rigs allows the United States to drill more wells than any other country. Furthermore, we have the rednecks—and I use that word respectfully—who are able and willing to do the difficult and sometimes dangerous work needed to produce oil and gas. Those men (and some women) are operating and managing those rigs and fracturing operations at all hours of the day and night. Once the rigs and rednecks have finished drilling and fracturing their wells, the hydrocarbons from those wells flow into US pipelines, the world’s biggest network with some 1.8 million miles of natural gas pipeline.48
Maybe just as important as the rigs, rednecks, and pipes is the issue of mineral rights. America is anomalous in that individuals can own the minerals beneath their feet. No other country allows it. Here, landowners who also own their mineral rights have a huge incentive to encourage drilling on their property as they will get at least one-eighth of the value of the oil and gas produced. In other countries, farmers and rural landowners are naturally opposed to drilling on, or near, their land because they are unlikely to get any economic benefit from the noise, truck traffic, and other disruptions that can come with drilling an oil or gas well.
The punch line of this chapter is this: regardless of which issue you pick—rigs, rednecks, pipes, demographics, geography, agriculture, finance, schools, or mineral rights—America dominates, and no other country even comes close. So don’t start saying last rites over the corpse of these United States. Not yet. Yes, America faces plenty of struggles, but it faces even more opportunities. America excels at making things Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper, and it will continue to excel in the decades ahead. We have the people, the schools, and the resources needed to continue driving the Smaller Faster revolution. We just need to make sure that we use them to our full advantage.
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CONCLUSION
MOVING PAST FEAR
For years, the message we’ve been getting from leading environmentalists has been consistent: reject economic growth, reject modernism, and reject modern forms of energy. And the drumbeat of doom continues. In early 2013, some forty-five years after the publication of his book The Population Bomb, Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich was still pushing his claim that we are facing a catastrophe. In an interview in Forbes, Ehrlich was asked what he might say to President Barack Obama if given the chance. Erhlich replied that Obama “should lead the world in showing that economic growth is the disease, not the cure, and shift focus to equity and gross national happiness.”1
While Ehrlich clings to his neo-Malthusian views, America’s most prominent environmentalists continue to demonize natural gas, even though the fuel (along with nuclear) offers the only near-term alternative to coal. Bill McKibben of 350.org has denounced natural gas, saying that the energy source is not a bridge fuel, it is “just a rickety pier stretching further out into the fossil fuel lake.” McKibben also says that hydraulic fracturing, the process used to break up tight geological formations so they can produce oil and gas, must be stopped.2
The head of the Sierra Club, Michael Brune, has shown his catastrophist credentials. Rather than embracing natural gas as a way toward cleaner air and lower carbon dioxide emissions, he’s begun calling natural gas an “extreme fossil fuel.” Brune claims that gas is “a gangplank to a destabilized climate and an impoverished economy.”3
While McKibben and the Sierra Club are attacking natural gas, other activists are continuing their protests against genetically modified plants. In May 2013, organizers held the March Against Monsanto, an effort aimed at calling attention to the seed giant’s push to produce more genetically modified organisms. Marches were reportedly held in more than four hundred cities. The marches were organized by a Utah-based woman, Tami Monroe Canal, who said the group’s protests will “continue until Monsanto complies with consumer demand. They are poisoning our children, poisoning our planet.”4 Shortly before the protest was held, in an interview posted on YouTube, Canal claimed that the company has “no intention of serving the people. They betray humanity. They betray life. They malign Mother Nature. And they do so at the expense of all of us.”5
What binds the views of Ehrlich, McKibben, Brune, Canal, and many others is their never-ending worry. Their outlook rejects innovation and modern forms of energy. It rejects business and capitalism. Whether the message is explicit or implicit, the message coming from many of the “greens” is an anticorporate, anticapitalist stance that is rooted in the notion that any large business is one to be feared. Monsanto is bad. Halliburton, a company that does hydraulic fracturing, is bad. Meanwhile, in 2013, Apple was named the world’s most-admired company by Fortune magazine. Never mind that in mid-2013, Apple’s market capitalization of about $
400 billion was roughly eight times that of Monsanto’s and ten times that of Halliburton’s.6
We have to discard the notion that profits are bad. We must accept—and better yet, celebrate—the tinkerers and entrepreneurs who are designing better batteries, more efficient lights, and better drill rigs in the hope of making money. We must move past the climate of fear to one of optimism. We must move past fear of technology to an understanding that technology isn’t the problem; it’s the solution.
There’s no question that we humans have changed the face of the planet. And we will continue changing it. Some species will disappear, and many of those extinctions will be due to human blundering. Parts of paradise will be paved. But we cannot forsake human creativity, economic productivity, and our efforts to end hunger and poverty, in the hope that doing so will magically restore the planet’s ecological systems. We’ve dammed rivers, plowed the prairies, and drilled oil wells in the rain forests. Activities like that will continue, and as they do, we will see more tradeoffs. But we cannot simply stop economic development. The notion of degrowth being pushed by groups like Worldwatch Institute, Greenpeace, and others, is an affront to human ingenuity and aspiration. The claim that we can all rely on renewable energy—an assertion that we keep hearing from activists like Bill McKibben and biofuel hucksters like Amory Lovins—is a damnable lie.
We humans are not going to retreat back to the grinding poverty that stunted so many lives in the past and continues to do so in the world’s least-developed places. We are, most of us, city dwellers. We are not going to “return to the land.” Not willingly.
We call our species homo sapiens—wise man—but we are, in fact, homo faber, man the creator. We have changed the face of this planet with our tools and structures, and we will continue doing so. Assuring future prosperity requires that we continue exploring the atom and exploring deep space. We must continue creating new tools and nourishing new ideas. Our future depends on innovation. We need innovation so we can make energy Cheaper. Cheaper energy will foster better living standards and more innovation. If we are going to reduce the rate of growth in carbon dioxide emissions, we have to disseminate technologies for natural gas production to the countries that lack them. We have to get good at nuclear. And we will. The United States and other countries must continue investing in making nuclear reactors safer and Cheaper so that the power of the atom can be more effectively harnessed.
Smaller computing devices, Faster communications, Lighter vehicles, Denser cities, and Cheaper energy will help foster innovation. Innovation, in turn, will generate the wealth and new ideas and technologies we need to deal with the challenges we face, whether it’s a changing climate, food and water scarcity, or difficult diseases. The best way to protect the environment is to get richer. Wealthy countries can afford to protect the environment. Poor ones generally can’t.
We need more wealth, more economic growth, more jobs. We need, as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have written, “a new, creative, and life-affirming worldview . . . Wealth and technology liberated us from hunger, deprivation, and insecurity; now they must be considered essential to overcoming ecological risks.”7 British journalist and environmental activist Mark Lynas gives a similar view for why we need such a positive outlook. In his 2011 book, The God Species, Lynas wrote, “Only optimism can give us the motivation and passion we will need to succeed. Voices of doom may be persuasive, but theirs is a counsel of despair.”8
For decades—even for centuries—we’ve been deadened by the drumbeat of despair. It’s time to dismiss the Jeremiahs who are claiming that our redemption lies in rejecting modernity and economic growth. It’s time to reject the dystopians, catastrophists, fearmongers, and doomsayers. It’s time for an anti-neo-Malthusian outlook. It’s time for an outlook that embraces humanism, optimism, technology, and a belief that things are getting better. Such an outlook is not only life-affirming, it also has the virtue of being true. Technology and economic growth have brought—and are bringing—tens of millions of people out of the dark and into the electric-lit world of ideas, education, and fuller, healthier, freer, more fulfilling lives. That same growth is helping to protect nature.
I am—as the late author Molly Ivins used to say—“optimistic to the point of idiocy.” And that nearly idiotic optimism springs from the inexorable human desire for Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper.
APPENDIX A
SI NUMERICAL DESIGNATIONS
We use many numerical designations—milli, mega, nano—–on a regular basis without recognizing that they are part of the International System of Units. The system is commonly known as SI, the abbreviation for Système International d’Unités. (France was instrumental in the effort to harmonize units of measure.) Given that most people are only passingly familiar with these designations, see below for a review of all of the numerical designations—from yocto and yotta.
The difference between yocto and yotta is the difference between a septillionth and a septillion. Between yocto, the SI prefix for 10-24, and yotta (sometimes spelled yota), the SI prefix for 1024, there are 48 zeroes. It’s the difference between 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001 and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. But in SI, those numbers would be written without the commas, thus, yocto is: 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001; and yotta is: 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.
Herewith, all of the SI numerical designations and their symbols.
Source: http://www.math.com/tables/general/numnotation.htm.
APPENDIX B
ENERGY AND POWER: UNITS AND EQUIVALENTS
POWER UNITS AND EQUIVALENCIES
1 watt (W) = 0.00134 horsepower or 1 joule/second (J/s)
1 kilowatt = 1,000 watts or 1.35 horsepower (hp)
1 megawatt = 1,000 kilowatts, or 1,000,000 watts
1 gigawatt = 1,000 megawatts, 1,000,000 kilowatts, or 1,000,000,000 watts
1 terawatt = 1,000 gigawatts, 1,000,000 megawatts, 1,000,000,000 kilowatts, or 1,000,000,000,000 watts
1 electric lamp of 100 W = 0.1 kW
1 car engine with a 60 hp engine = 44 kW
1 wind turbine rated at 1 megawatt (MW) = 1,350 hp
1 nuclear plant with 1,000 MW of capacity = 1,350,000 hp
1 gallon of oil equivalent per day = 0.71 hp (529 W)
1 barrel of oil equivalent per day = 30 hp (22.1 kW)
1,000 cubic feet of natural gas per day = 5 hp (3,819 W)
1 day of Saudi Arabia’s oil production = 250,000,000 hp (186.5 billion W or 186.5 gigawatts)
ENERGY UNITS AND EQUIVALENCIES
0.1 joule = energy used in average golf putt
1 Btu = energy released by burning 1 wooden match = 1.055 kilojoules
1 cubic foot of natural gas = 1,031 Btu = 1.09 megajoules
1 cubic foot = volume of a regulation basketball
1 cubic meter = 35.3 cubic feet
1 kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity = 3,412 Btu = 3.6 megajoules
1 gallon gasoline = 125,000 Btu = 125 megajoules
1 gallon gasoline = 36 kWh of electricity
1 ton of oil = 7.33 barrels (bbl) of oil
1 bbl of oil = 42 gallons or 159 liters
1 bbl of oil equivalent = 5,800,000 Btu = 5.8 gigajoules
1 bbl of oil equivalent = 1.64 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity
1 bbl of oil equivalent = 5,487 cubic feet of natural gas
1 kilowatt-hour (kWh) = 1,000 watts for 1 hour
1 megawatt-hour (MWh) = 1,000,000 watts for 1 hour
APPENDIX C
GRAVIMETRIC POWER DENSITY FROM HUMANS TO JET ENGINES
APPENDIX D
FIVE LEADERS IN ONLINE LEARNING
Dozens of companies have sprung up in recent years to promote online learning. This list provides only a summary of some of the more prominent ones.
APPENDIX E
WIND ENERGY’S NOISE PROBLEM: A REVIEW
The fundamental problem with wind energy is its low power density. Trying to extract significant quantities o
f energy from the wind requires large turbines to have blades that move at high speeds. And those blades create low-frequency noise and infrasound that is affecting people living near wind projects. Herewith, a partial summary of recent global developments on the wind-turbine noise problem.
• In 2009, a standing committee of the parliament in New South Wales, Australia, recommended “a two-kilometer minimum setback between wind turbines and neighboring houses.”1 The committee concluded that “reputable research has shown that noise annoyance is an adverse health effect that can result from wind farms, as it can result in effects such as negative emotions and sleep disturbance.”2
• In 2010, a book published in New Zealand, Sound, Noise, Flicker and the Human Perception of Wind Farm Activity, which includes twenty-three peer-reviewed articles by acousticians and engineers, concludes that “the latest research indicates that nuisance noise from wind farms is associated with psychological distress, stress, difficulties with falling asleep, and sleep interruption . . . It is clear that there must be far more care in the siting of any future wind farms and a better understanding of how to mitigate the noise and compensate the affected individuals.”3