Burning Picassos

I ran across this article the other day with a challenging title.

http://scitizen.com/stories/future-energies/2009/08/Burning-Picassos-for-Heat/

The author equates using nuclear energy to power tar sands extraction to burning fine art for heat. Stupid oil companies, who would ever do something like that?

People who are very cold in an art museum.

If you have a need for one thing and an abundance of another, who wouldn't trade the excess to meet the need? That is exactly where we find ourselves in the energy world. We need transportation fuel (which currently equals oil), and we have (or can have) plenty of electricity from nuclear plants. So the logical choice is to trade the nuclear power for the oil, no matter what the efficiency losses are.

Liquid hydrocarbons (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, etc.) are the most convenient and energy-dense fuels that we have available today. It's easy to talk about changing to electric cars, but a lot harder to do. As long as we value the convenience and low cost of our liquid-powered cars more than pure energy efficiency (and who really thinks about that first thing in the morning?), the oil companies will be happy to make the trade-off of Picassos for heat.