It was almost inevitable that a combination of $4-a-gallon gas, public anxiety and politicians eager to win votes or repair legacies would produce political pandering on an epic scale. So it has, the latest instance being President Bush’s decision to ask Congress to end the federal ban on offshore oil and gas drilling along much of America’s continental shelf.
This is worse than a dumb idea. It is cruelly misleading. It will make only a modest difference, at best, to prices at the pump, and even then the benefits will be years away. It greatly exaggerates America’s leverage over world oil prices. It is based on dubious statistics. It diverts the public from the tough decisions that need to be made about conservation.
In 1973 Nixon created an “Energy Department” to help the USA develope a comprehensive energy program. As of today, where have we gotten with a comprehensive eneergy plan? During the last oil crises we were told “we can’t drill out of this” etc. etc. What we can do is develope alternatives such as coal gassification, oil shale production, hydrogen cells, electric vehicles etc. The alternative is to wring our hands, proclaimed the sky has fallen and do nothing. Four years from we can be producing more of our own oil, implementing alternative energy and developing independance from imported petroleum based energy system, or still be wringing our hands and lamenting the fallen sky!!! Four years from now will be four years from now, what we do during that four years is our choice. If we do nothing don’t blame big oil, don’t blame OPEC, don’t blame the Republicans, don’t blame the Democrates, get a big mirror and point a big finger at your self, and for heavens sake quite reading articles that say we can’t do anything but conserve. We can’t conserve our way out of this either.
What is so precious about the areas in which oil exploration and oil field development are not now permitted by the U.S. Government?
The same “forever wild” mentality that enthuses tree huggers and whale watchers has driven the effort, led mostly by Democrats, to put our oil-rich natural resources off-limits.
These politicians would rather have the U.S. be dependent upon oil fields located in remote, militarily indefensible and unfriendly regions of the world. They oppose energy independence in the sacred name of “Green.” No wind farms or nuclear reactors in their back yards, maybe someone elses’, but not theirs. They are too precious to be inconvenienced. They’d rather see some other country’s land area or sea shelf be the source of extraction for crude oil.
Yet, the Greens are statisitcally, probably, the least likely to serve in our country’s armed forces. They are just too precious to be subjected to personal sacrifice and discipline.
So as Rudyard Kipling said, “When the troop ship is at the pier…,”
it will be the U.S. citizens from the recently defined “red states,” counties and townships who will have to go to war to preserve our sources of crude oil located in remote and unfriendly regions.
There are exactly two ways to lower the real price of something. Increase supply or lower demand. The proposed exploration would serve to increase supply. That will lower prices. Further, every new energy intitaitive other than the economicvally non viable alternatives of solar and wind have been met with “the effects won’t be felt in the short term”. Which strongly suggests that the opponents are against any new energy initiatives period.
The devotees of the voodoo religion of global warming need to stop demanding that other people sacrifice for their benefit. If they wish to halt a potential phenomenon that may or may not be caused by our species, then they really ought to lower their own ‘carbon footprint’, preferably to zero. To ask that other people suffer requires leadership by example, which example has heretofore been lacking.
It’s past time for the US to build nuclear more power plants and resume oil exploration on the continental shelf and in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve. That the effects will not be felt within the next election cycle is all the more reason to do it.
That should read “more nuclear power plants”.
It is, to the contrary, the New York Times’ approach which is the really dumb idea.
I’m not so sure that steps taken now would have [i]no[/i] effect for four years. Just the knowledge that new oil sources will be available will have a dampening effect on the commodities futures. It won’t help a big amount until the new sources and new refineries are online, but it will moderate the market.
Certainly, at the same time that we are drilling and building refineries, searches for economically viable alternative energy sources should continue, as should reasonable conservation efforts. It’s not an either/or thing.
And lastly, but not least important: We need to be licensing and building nuclear power plants.
When it comes to having to heating your home, after a certain point, conservation is a moot point. $4.00 fuel oil, in an area of the country that doesn’t have readily available alternatives such as natural gas, is the plain and simple reality. (Incidentally, there is a moratorium against converting to electric heat in his area, not to mention that it’s simply not affordable anyhow.) Once you’ve insulated your house to beat the band, upgraded to a high efficiency furnace and are already keeping the thermostat at 65 degrees, what else can you do? Chatter your teeth and bear with it?
By way of example, my Christmas gift to my elderly widowed father the past few years has been to pay $100 his heating bill every month for six months. (By the way, because it’s a Christmas gift, he sense of personal dignity remains intact.) My own personal resources are limited and rather fixed, yet I am considering what I can do to give even more. After all, the price of oil has skyrocketed since last heating season.
Unless Congress can come up with heating alternatives as well, there is no other option but to drill for more oil. Meanwhile, I am so sick of this being a “gasoline” driven crisis. Hey folks, people are having to choose between food and heating the house.
RE: “It will make only a modest difference, at best, to prices at the pump . . . ”
That’s okay — I’ll take “modest difference” in my fuel costs.
RE: “and even then the benefits will be years away . . . ”
That’s okay — I’m a long-term sort of person anyway.
The “years away” argument was made by these same people years ago. If we had ignored them then, we’d be pumping that oil today.
Do a Google search on +chinese +oil +”gulf coast”. And, as always, consider the sources providing the information.
Even if the information revealed in the above search is somewhat slanted and/or not 100% accurate, it does raise the question of “Why do we not allow ourselves to drill within our territorial boundaries, if our competitors are (allegedly) drilling just beyond them (possibly without the same environmental safeguards that we employ)?”
Drilling for new oil only prolongs and delays the inevitable, without making much difference to our gas prices (but creating wealth for oil company execs and stockholders).
Mousetalker is right in that the real long-term solution is to reduce demand. We need to invest more into intra- and inter-urban mass transit; tele- and vido-conferencing for business; and alternative fuels such as hydrogen along with wind, solar, and nuclear power. We need to reward responsible (not economically crippling) reduction in use of fossil fuels.
Scott is right. We are going to run out of oil eventually. AND, the sun is going to eventually die as well. PLUS, we’ll all be dead eventually anyways. So what’s the point? More drilling isn’t going to prevent these inevitabilities. We need new solutions.
I missed the part in mousetalker’s post where he said reducing demand was the “real long-term solution”. I read it three times and it keeps reading as if he is talking about increasing supply. He must be writing in code, I guess.
Scott K, I am an oil company stock holder because of my 5013B retirement fund. The stock company execs hold only about 1.3% of oil company stock, private individuals hold much of the rest. If you have a retirement account invested in mutual funds covering broad sectors of of the economy you are probably an oil stock owner also. Wind, solar and nuclear power can only go so far and will help in a COMPREHENSIVE energy plan, as will mass transit (if people will use it). We have not built a refienery in the USA since 1972, wind turbines are blocked because of NIMBY (ask Ted Kennedy about Hyannis Port wind turbine project he blocked so as not to disturb his view) and problems with birds of prey being killed. It is very difficult to get permits for nuclear reactors. Government regulation hampers and hinders investment in energy production. The Govenor of Montana , a Democrate, talked about coal gassification. He stated we have enought coal to run America for a thusand years. During the last energy crises there were plans to build 19 coal gassification plants. There was one built. No more were built due to fear of governemnt regulation ( this is a Democrate talking). With talk of nationalization of the oil industry would you invest your money, work and effort only to have Uncle Sam come in an say “sorry but this is now mine”?
I’m pretty sure I was thinking about both sides of the equation. As the cost of energy increases, demand diminishes. So I’m not very comfortable with mandated reductions in demand due to governemental fiat (I think that will likely have the unintended consequence of making our economy less competitive).
Increased supply is also part of it. It is likely that the global oil supply can be increased, but it not just probably but certain that the global energy supply can be increased. Nuclear is the most currently practical, but other avenues need to be explored (fusion and near earth orbit solar are two).
Any form of energy generation (or collection for geothermal, water, solar or wind) has side effects. From all accounts, no one wants wind farms in their backyards, and wind is not reliable. Solar is not quite cost effective. Geothermal and hydraulic are pretty much fully exploited right now. Nuclear has issues with waste disposal. Fossil fuels are all dirty.
But increasing the supply of one form of energy has a direct impact on the price of all other forms of energy. I don’t think we ought to limit ourselves to whatever may be trendy. We need to think about the trade offs and make long term decisions.
As for me, I think we ought to have enough nuclear power capacity to generate 100 per cent of the current US energy needs. That allows room for further expansion of the economy (the Hoover Dam isn’t going anywhere), a high level of flexibility in meeting current demands (electric cars become more practical) and gets us away from our gasoline addiction.
It would also clean the air up, which could only be a good thing. Currently the Northeast has a great deal of its electricity generated by coal and oil power plants. I think we need to be able to walk away from those.
It’s also worth noting that part of the price increase in crude oil has been driven by speculation, resulting in something of a bubble right now. Eventually, someone is likely to lose a considerable amount of money.
Mousetalker,
thirty plus years ago, the US introduced the clean air act. Since that time:
[blockquote] Carbonmonoxide emissions have been lowered by31 percent, volatile organic compounds by42 percent, sulfur dioxide by 37 percent,particulate matter (PM-10) by 71 percent,and lead by 98 percent. [and] achieved considerable reductions in SO2 from power plants … at a fraction of the projected costs.[/blockquote]
from the summary of the report [url=http://www.edf.org/pdf.cfm?contentid=398&FileName=CAAReport.PDF.]Building on 30 years of clean air act success[/url].
sorry, I typed in the link wrong. This [url=http://www.edf.org/documents/398_CAAReport.PDF]link to the report[/url] should work.
The point is, we have cleaner air than anytime since the industrial revolution, and much cleaner air than any other developed nation.
Jim Elliott <><
I beleive that there are a group of fanatics to include KJS who want to force a green agenda upon us even if it is not in our best interest. Therefore we should not drill for more oil. It is obviously a both/and situation but we will be dependant on oil for a while and we need more of it.
Building codes all over the country which include requiring mandatory solar panels on the roofs or in the back yards of every new home built would go a long way toward reducing greenhouse gases while at the same time allowing homeowners to sell their excess electricity to their local power company, and the same requirements could be applied to new commercial construction. Solar panel fields in deserts and agricultural areas, while expensive to build and maintain, could go a long way to help increase electrical power production and add it to the grid.
I continue to be stunned by the amount of disinformation being promulgated by the anti-drilling enviro-whacko druid forces deployed against me driving my car. Here are some of the more amazing examples:
And it’s stunning to me how the Druids have to have it both ways. First, they say “there’s a whole lot of speculatin’ going on in the oil bidness. We got to get rid of all dat speculatin'” to help lower the price of a barrel of oil. Well, if there is speculation, the DAY the Congress gives states the right to determine for themselves where they will drill, the “speculatin'” capital will RUN not walk away from the price of a barrel of oil and the price will drop based on new rational expectations of future prices of the commodity. And there is good evidence for speculatin’ just this morning, as China announced they would adjust their (government controlled) pricing for oil and gas UPWARDS about 10% (their citizens have been insulated from what we are experiencing, as have the citizens of other countries like Brazil, Venezuala, and Iran by their governments) and the price of a barrel of oil FELL 4% immediately.
If there’s NO speculatin’, and the price of oil is based strictly on demand, then announcing the drilling won’t change the price. But DRILLING and increasing production will alter the price equation.
Truth be know, doom and gloom pundits aside, we’ve easily got enough AMERICAN oil, gas, tar sand and shale to match our needs at say a 65% domestic consumption level (we’re at about 45% right now, last I checked) for 200+ years.
Now, if mankind can’t come up with a better alternative to petroleum in the next 200 years, I would be quite suprised. Consider that our petroleum economy is really only about 100 years old today.
The alternative (allowing gasoline and fuel oils to go up to $7 or $8 a gallon) will cripple our economy and decimate the poor. Society can absorb increasing prices as long as they increase at about the same rates as their wages. Consider how increasing costs of healthcare are strapping the populace, oil can do the same thing.
KTF!….mrb
Well, actually, #16, the US does not have cleaner air than Australia, which is a developed nation, BTW.
Whether you like Bush or hate him, at least he is trying to do something. As I read that article, all the writer could do was criticize but did not offer any alternative solutions. Its the fact that people like him have for decades been arguing this “not in my backyard” logic which created little new energy expansion while energy demand has risen. The fallout has ultimately become our dependence on foreign suppliers. You can’t have your cake and eat it to.
Scott K…I don’t know how you or others plan to get to Europe or Hawaii or where ever on your next vacation or business trip. Have we all forgotten that airlines and airplanes and ships and buses (we virtually have no train service) all run on fuel. I’ll bet all the TEC bishops are “flying” to England for their every decade tea party. But in the future I suppose they can sail there on a four masted schooner. In the US we can just get out the old horse and buggy round up the family or your same sex partner and trundle on down from say Seattle to Miami for the winter break. Our economy is fueled by well…err…fuel! How the morons in congress of both parties have just dithered and put up one road block after another to energy independence at the behest of the eco-fundamentalists is nothing short of criminal or, better yet, treasonous.
Indeed, announcing a change in policies should result in a quick price drop as speculative prices become less attractive.
I believe, however, that the slowest part of getting domestic oil production going is actually dealing with the various bureaucracies, including getting approval in the first place. I saw something recently on the high-speed rail line between DC and Charlotte, NC, first proposed in the early 90’s. The environmental impact statement (EIS) is expected to be completed in 2012. Similar, if not worse, obstacles stand in the way of domestic petroleum production. (NB: That’s not to say that an EIS is a bad thing per se, just that the process it involves is outrageously slow and expensive.)
I also wonder whether we have something of a moral obligation not to export risk (including environmental risk) that we are not willing to take ourselves. By not producing more petroleum domestically, we shift any environmental risks to poorer countries that are less able (and sometimes less willing) to deal with the consequences of accidents. It seems to me that producing more oil domestically would result in lower levels of pollution globally.
#23 Don R I totally agree with you that our honoring of the Druids wishes over common sense and personal responsibility has allowed us to export risk to countries without the resources to recover from bad production practices. By benefitting from drilling in far away lands we have essentially authorized the creation of 3rd World environmental nightmares paid for with American Dollars.
I heard a rather astute economics professor during my MBA studies back in the early 90’s describe our energy policy as “Beggar Thy Neighbor” i.e. let’s use up everybody else’s oil first, so that when they run out, we’ll still have some. Sort of like making us the last man standing with the most precious commodity.
I guess that works when the other guys are willing to play ball with you, but what happens when they cut you off? Or when their own country modernizes and they decide to keep the oil for themselves? I think it was economically attractive at $19 a barrel, but not any more.
And for my Druid friends who think we can get along without that dirty, bad Petroleum, look around your house and count how many things you own that were made of, or with Petroleum or its by-products. Start with the computer you’re viewing this on and then EVERYTHING made out of plastic….and you’ll begin to understand the problem.
KTF!….mrb
TACit,
While that is true, Australia does not have the history of industrialization that the US has.
Hey, before we drilled wells we got our oil from whales. Why reinvent the wheel, here?
I discovered a few years ago that my old thermodynamics prof from my undergrad days at Caltech had written a book called Out of Gas. It’s kind of a depressing read.
He makes a couple of points: first of all, no matter where we drill and how clever we get at extracting shale oil or whatever, when all is said and done there’s only so much oil there to be had. If we keep using it, we’ll run out eventually. And since consumption is increasing at a significant rate — especially as China and India come on-line as major industrial powers — we’re using the remaining stocks faster and faster, which means the moment when we start hitting major shortages will almost certainly come sooner than we expect.
This is basically the “Peak Oil” argument. Google on that and you’ll find plenty of arguments for and against. But the arguments are pretty much all on timing; some people think we’ve already hit peak oil, some people think we haven’t yet but it’s close, some people think that it’s still decades or even centuries away. But however you cut it, eventually we’ll start running out.
When that happens (ideally before that happens) we’d better have switched our infrastructure over to alternative sources of energy. Here’s one of the catches: it will cost energy, a lot of it, to rebuild a fossil-fuel-based civilization onto some other base. If we wait too long, we may well find that we don’t have enough fossil fuels left “in the bank” to make that switchover.
Here’s the second point he makes: we use fossil fuels for a reason. When you compare the energy you have to invest to get it versus the energy you get out of it, fossil fuels have the greatest delta of any of the alternatives. No other source of energy is as good — if it were, odds are we’d be using it instead. Nuclear is the next best, and we can get a pretty good run on it; but ultimately that has the same problem fossil fuel does — there’s only so much fissile material around. Still, nuclear is almost certainly where we need to be investing next. Americans have a weird phobia about nuclear power, but that’s something we’re going to have to get over. Ideally soon.
But even with nuclear — and especially during the transition, if we put it off too long — we’re going to have to learn to live on a leaner energy budget. Probably a lot leaner, for those of us in the first world. More efficient use of the available energy will doubtless help, but I don’t think we can avoid significant lifestyle changes whether we like it or not.
That’s precisely why we need to actively pursue ALL means of producing the energy we need. Natural gas, oil, nuclear power, hydroelectric and solar energy, wind power……you name it, and we MUST do it……NOW……not when the oil runs out!
Over forty years ago, John Kennedy urged us to get into space, and it took massive Congressional support in order to get there. What’s stopping Congress from doing the same thing in ensuring renewable energy supplies by actively promoting development of the energy sources that we so desperately need?
I think we all know the answer to that question!
Ross, I hope you are wrong about how hard it will be, but I agree that we need to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, reagrdless of the difficulty.
While I do not think we should hang our hats on them, there are two potential sources of energy that have not been tried. The first is fusion, especially cold fusion. It is entirely possible that it may never be practicable, but I think it needs to be explored.
The other is orbital solar power. Almost all of the satellites now in orbit use it. Outside of the atmosphere, the sun is a very efficient source of power. Any process that is energy, but not manpower intensive is ideal for orbital manufacture. Also, space has the advantage of a very large incinerator down the gravity well from us. Again, it’s not currently practical, but it needs to be explored.
Watching McBush contort this week on offshore drilling has been every bit as uncomfortable as the pandering W has done evry time he visits the Saudis.
America consumes 25% of all the wrold’s oil – until we face the hard realities of that, this is simply game playing by the party of Big Oil.
mousestalker, there was something interesting on cold fusion a couple of weeks ago: [url=http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/05/reproducable-cold-fusion-excess-heat.html]Reproducible Cold Fusion Excess Heat experiment[/url]. There was also another report somewhere from earlier in May. It would be great it something useful came of it.
bob carlton, America does indeed use about 25% of the world’s oil (down from closer to 30% in the early 70’s); in fact we use about 25% of all the resources used in the entire world in a given year. Not coincidentally, that seems like just about the right amount in order to produce about 25% of the world’s total economic output. Or do you have some way you think America should be able to produce that much while using a disproportionately small amount of resources?
mousetalker, I remember somewhere that Tesla found a way to transmit energy through the atmosphere. It wasn’t profitable as you couldn’t control it to sell it. But is this the way near orbit solar power will be transmitted down here? I know nothing of this technology and it sounds fascinating.
It’s interesting and regrettable that geothermal hardly even appears in most of the above lists of possible alternatives. Ross is right about ‘the transition’ that must be made – for which mature citizens will want to take responsibility, rather than foist it on their own descendants’ generations.
The mineral industries are way ahead of you – Alcoa is starting to power bauxite refinement in Iceland off the super-abundant energy from the circulating hot water there (see National Geographic!), and equally interesting is the uranium mine in South Australia planning to use energy from the local groundwaters, already much hotter due to, yes, the U in place, funny coincidence. (This is easily googled with a few keywords, btw). A few regions in the US in fact are advanced in using geothermal and in developmental research on it. These industries realize that the technology available everywhere there is a fossil fuel industry is easily applied, often with little modification, to getting hot water out of the ground if it’s there. And it is frequently ‘there’.
Big Oil (i.e. ExxonMobil & friends) has always and will always embed itself in scenes like fighting over the staggeringly large fossil fuel deposits in the Middle East because that is its raison d’etre, to hunt the elephants and nothing smaller. So it’s almost irrelevant for the ‘Newspaper of record’ to put up such a headline – it’s a ‘DUH!’
In the long run and in between the ‘contraction pangs’, as giant oil fields become increasingly hard to find and expensive to develop and produce, new energy sources exploitable with as little additional technological innovation as possible (since it costs) must be developed and proven. The mineral industries realize that it is irresponsible not to do so.
The latest stupid proposal of the House democrats is to nationalize the refineries. If it works like the perscription program expect $8.00 to $12.00 oil per gallon. The refineries are currently working at maximun capacity; however, they are all old and this same group has been insturmental in not allowing any new ones to be built for about 35 years. Also as long as futures continue to climb there is no way to reduce prices, olny the threat of new or increased production will solve this problem.
TACit,
It is interesting to note, too, that George W. Bush’s Crawford TX home is partially powered by geothermal. And, according to an e-mail I’ve received and confirmed with [url=http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp]Snopes[/url], his home there is ‘greener’ and more energy efficient than Al Gore’s TN mansion!