Oil Carries a Few Externalities, Like Death and Dismemberment
I received the normal pushback on my recent piece praising electric transportation. In response, I make two broad points:
1) We are most definitely headed in the direction of clean energy, electric transportation (including small, urban commuter vehicles, e-bikes, mass transit, car-sharing, etc.), smart-grid, energy storage, and so forth. For a great number of reasons, we will not be burning coal and driving Hummers in 2050. One of these reasons is cost: the cost of renewables is falling, and will continue to do so.
My point is that each of these arenas will improve in something close to lockstep: cheaper and cleaner energy/storage and transportation. There are, of course, important questions about exactly how and when this will occur, and who’s going to make a buck in the process.
2) I call your attention to the variety of externalities of oil, which include war. I recently became aware that there are very scholarly, actuarial-style analyses of the value of a human life; see the discussion below if you think I’m kidding.
I’m not sure how you do this type of thinking without laughing. I just can’t imagine what Socrates, Jesus, or Buddha would say — but I can tell you very specifically what I say: our sending our children to fight and die over oil is an abomination.
The “statistical lives lost” approach to valuing premature mortality estimates the value of a statistical death to be $6.12 million (in 1999 dollars). We assume for this analysis that some of the incidences of premature mortality related to PM exposures occur in a distributed fashion over the five years following exposure (the five-year mortality lag). To take this into account in the valuation of reductions in premature mortalities, we apply an annual five percent discount rate to the value of premature mortalities occurring in future years.
Statistical Lives Lost. The “statistical lives lost” value of $6.12 million represents an intermediate value from a variety of estimates that appear in the economics literature, and is a value that EPA has frequently used. This estimate is the mean of a distribution fitted to the estimates from 26 value-of-life studies identified in the §812 study as “applicable to policy analysis.” The approach and set of selected studies mirrors that of Viscusi (1992) (with the addition of two studies), and uses the same criteria used by Viscusi in his review of value-of-life studies.
The $6.12 million estimate is consistent with Viscusi’s conclusion (updated to 1999 dollars) that “most of the reasonable estimates of the value of life are clustered in the $3.84 to $8.93 million range.” Uncertainty associated with the valuation of premature mortality is expressed through a Weibull distribution with a standard deviation of $4.13 million (IEc 1992, p. 2).
Our dependence on imported oil is one of the drivers of our foreign policy.
Craig,
What was the oil production of Iraq prior to the 2003 launch of the war? (Answer: ~2.8 million bbl/day. It would have been much higher, but sanctions kept oil production lower.)
What was the oil production of Iraq in 2010: (answer ~2.3 million bbl/day.)
Looking at the answers to those two questions should tell you everything you need to know about the correlation between violence and oil production:
VIOLENCE REDUCES OIL PRODUCTION.
If you doubt that, you can feel free to compare any other conflict, from Nigeria to Libya to Syria to wherever you like. Any time the bombs start to fall so does production, and production stays low for years if not decades.
So, anyone who wishes to declare war in order to achieve greater oil security is a fool. Since George W. Bush could properly be characterized as foolish, it’s possible that is the only reason we went into Iraq… but I don’t believe Cheney was a fool (evil? – maybe, fool? – no), so there must be some other reason.
I believe that the reason behind the invasion of Iraq was for CONTROL of PROFIT from the oil. That distinction is important, because if you shift the primary fuel dependence to require access to lithium, the motivation to control the profit from lithium will become just as strong as the current motivation to control the profit from oil… That means if we elect another warmonger, we might just find a reason to invade Chile for control of their salt flats… or something similar.
The type of energy will not eliminate a warmonger’s desire to go to war in order to control something, and our current dependence on oil is not a reason or justification to go to war with an oil producing country – it should serve as a deterrent to do so.
Some excellent points. Here’s my response: http://2greenenergy.com/lateral-power/19505/.