To the Editor:

The letter written by Stephen K. Hiltner, published in your April 3 issue [“Although the Tobacco Monster Was Slain, Fossil Fuel Monster Still in Growth Phase”), might have been considered an April Fool’s joke if it had been published a couple of days earlier. He compared the use of tobacco with our use of fossil fuels. Aside from satisfying addictions and enriching tobacco companies, farmers and government tax coffers, there is no benefit to society from consuming tobacco. On the other hand, mankind has been using fossil fuels for warmth and cooking food for thousands of years. Aside from more than 6,000 products that are produced from petroleum, fossil fuels illuminate, heat, and cool our homes and power our businesses, factories, transportation systems and modern agriculture.

Unless Mr. Hiltner intends to disconnect his home from our public utility system, stop using a car and public transportation, and forego all of the other modern conveniences and comforts that are powered by fossil fuels, his letter is duplicitous. It’s also filled with paranoia, misinformation, and falsehoods. Rather than expanding our per capita consumption of fossil fuels, as Mr. Hiltner claims, we have been highly successful in reducing it. Since 2005, our nation’s population has increased more than 18 million, yet according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration our consumption of crude oil petroleum products has decreased by a billion barrels per year during the same period.

Notwithstanding Mr. Hiltner’s claims to the contrary, our domestic oil production has enabled our country to decrease its oil imports 41.1 percent since 2005. Domestic oil and gas production not only provide much needed employment for American workers, exploiting our own resources will help our nation wean itself from having to import energy from unfriendly, unstable, unreliable countries. Our nation has made considerable progress in developing and utilizing renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, but those sources alone, because of their intermittency, cannot supply our needs without backup from other sources. Small, modular nuclear power plants that do not produce greenhouse gases and that can be produced in a factory and hauled to the installation site on a rail flatcar may help us power our electric grid until some new, yet undeveloped, source of power materializes.

Meanwhile, our modern transportation and agricultural systems will remain largely dependent upon petroleum until another, but as yet nonexistent energy source, is discovered. Gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel provide at least 25 times the energy density per pound of any other source of energy. Our most efficient lithium-ion batteries, capable of supplying the energy in 20 gallons of gasoline, would weigh more than 3,000 pounds. Aside from exorbitant cost, the carbon footprint from manufacturing a plug-in electric car is so high that it produces more greenhouse gases than driving a same-size gasoline-powered car 50,000 miles.

Anyone who is suggesting that our government should force us to “shift away from dependence on fossil fuels” ought to be offering affordable, practical alternatives; none of which I saw in Mr. Hiltner’s letter. Otherwise the “tough love” that he is advocating may mean our doing without the jobs, comforts, and modern conveniences that most of us enjoy.

Lewis A. Edge, Jr.

Cleveland Road West