It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas. Tim Blair
What do you imagine might be the environmental outcome if the rapacious, resource-devouring US were to rapidly add the equivalent of Australia to its already-massive population?
Probably nothing good, if you’re looking at things from an enviro-green perspective. After all, more people means more construction, more consumption and more carbon dioxide output.
Now imagine that this population increase is accompanied by an extraordinary boom in fossil fuel extraction.
Again, no green-minded person could possibly see anything positive here. Fossil fuels are Satan’s heroin, addicting and enslaving billions who through their fossil fuel use become complicit in the earth’s destruction.
Include another component. Let’s say these Americans are buying great big fuel-devouring trucks every 47 seconds over a period of ten years.
And that’s just one type of truck, Ford’s mighty F-series, among the 17 million or so new cars and trucks sold annually in the US. By comparison, Australians last year bought 1,062,867 new vehicles.
Well, all of these things happened.
From 2007 to 2017, the US population grew from 301.2 million to 325.7 million. That’s a boost of 24.5 million, which is just about equal to Australia’s population. They’ve matched in one decade our entire 232-year people project.
At the same time, Texas has led a remarkable boom in US oil and gas extraction. And Americans bought 7,393,479 of those stonking Ford trucks, along with everything else.
Can’t be good for the environment, right? Wrong. “From 2007 to 2017,” University of Texas energy resources professor Michael E. Webber reports, “the United States reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 14 per cent.”
How can this be so? By conventional enviro-green thinking, this simply should not add up.