Jonah Goldberg, Sage of the Oil Field

I had hoped that Jonah Goldberg's rant back in June of 2010 would be the last we would hear of him on this subject. Back then he wrote a column proclaiming that oil was the real green fuel. I couldn't believe my eyes. Well, HE'S BAAACK!  Now our sage of the oil field is proclaiming that "there is really no downside"  to "drill, baby. drill."He claims that the oil trapped in shale in North Dakota will solve all our problems and eliminate the need for imported oil while creating millions of jobs.

It’s just not that simple, but I suppose simple minds must see it that way. While we do need all alternatives to become energy self-sufficient that isn’t the real problem. The real problem is the continued burning of fossil fuels is exacerbating global warming and global warming is costing us great amounts of money and lives with extreme weather, flooding, and rising oceans. It causes famine and displacement of millions. It causes the acidification of the oceans killing coral and destroying fish habitats. Warming alters weather patterns causing insect infestations which destroy our forests, alters snowfall patterns affecting water supplies, melting glaciers inundating coastal lands and islands, and accelerating the release of dangerous green house gases such as methane from the melting Arctic tundra.

Goldberg states that the new fields recently opened in North Dakota that contain oil trapped in shale  means we have no energy problem for the next 30 years, so don't worry, be happy. The process of drilling for oil trapped in shale, called hydro-fracturing, or Fracking, is very expensive and pollutes the environment in a way that makes it very difficult to be cleaned up. That has its cost too. Let’s look carefully at Mr. Goldberg’s easy solution and figure out how to develop alternatives plus the so-called new oil like that trapped in sand and shale to figure how to recover it without destroying the environment in large parts of our beautiful country. We need solutions that are sustainable. After that oil is gone, then what? The alternatives won’t suddenly appear out of nowhere. We must begin in earnest to develop other alternatives now and not be distracted by easy solutions that will be gone sooner than we think. Funding for research of other alternatives must not be stopped just because we have easier sources.

He doesn't seem to realize that development of alternates other than oil can potentially create millions of jobs that won't go away when oil runs out. Whole new industries can come from the development of new technology for heat storage, new types of batteries, new solar panels and wind generators and new engines for transportation. Arpa-E, a division of the U.S. Energy Department, is pursuing other alternatives by funding research too risky for private companies to consider but which could result in great strides forward in solving our dependence on oil. One such ongoing project is developing new types of engines that could give a car a driving range of 500 mpg or more. Read about it in the February issue of Popular Science.