In
1973, the United States’ oil embargo on the Middle East resulted in an era of
energy scarcity. Now, forty years later, the country is on the cusp of an
energy revolution and an economic surge like never before.
What’s
behind this revolution? New technology!
Breakthroughs
like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) have allowed
energy companies to tap into vast reserves of oil and natural gas. Wind and
solar, once thought to be green fantasies, have finally become economically
feasible. Public utilities are reimagining our obsolete energy infrastructure
into something smarter and far more efficient.
By
2020, the U.S. could very well produce as much oil as it consumes, reducing the
country’s dependence on an often unstable, and therefore unpredictable, Middle
East.
“The
transformation we’ve seen in just the last few years from an outlook of
scarcity to one of abundance is real,” says Jason Bordoff, Director of Global
Energy Policy at Columbia University. “It has huge economic, geopolitical and
environmental implications.”
The
benefits are obvious. By replacing coal with cheaper, all-natural gas, the U.S.
has reduced carbon emissions despite bolstering domestic manufacturing. That means
that billions of dollars that would have gone overseas are now staying at home,
providing capital for future investments.
Yet
energy abundance comes with a whole new set of challenges. Environmentalists
have protested the government’s involvement in fracking for oil and gas, and
economists have warned that the energy bubble – like the dot com bubble of the
90s – could burst at any time.
But
the bubble isn’t just in oil and gas—renewables like solar and wind are growing
rapidly. And thanks to the government’s focus on energy efficiency, the U.S.
now gets twice as much “bang for its buck” than it did thirty years ago, when
the economy was a third its current size!
Global
greenhouse gas levels reached an all-time high last year, and in June, the International
Energy Agency claimed that we were headed towards a temperature increase as
high as 9.5°F by the end of the century – which would all but spell the end of
civilization as we know it.
Amy
Myers Jaffe, Executive Director of Energy and Sustainability at the University
of California – Davis, says that “people can no longer rely on high oil prices
and fossil-fuel scarcity to motivate a climate agenda. It completely changes
the picture.”
So
is too much of a good thing bad for you? The U.S. is about to find out.
[ energy bubble, energy scarcity, energy revolution, hydraulic fracturing, Jason Bordoff, Columbia University, Amy Myers Jaffe, Ana Shell NRGLab, gasification nrglab, NRGlab, NRGLab Pte Ltd ]
