George Will is at it again. His latest bit of inane demagoguery can be found here, in which he excoriates everyone who has ever opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge:
Also disqualified from complaining [about oil prices] are all voters who sent to Washington senators and representatives who have voted to keep ANWR's oil in the ground and who voted to put 85 percent of America's offshore territory off-limits to drilling.
Naturally, Will ignores the flip side of the coin. What about people who have opposed investing in renewable energy, increasing fuel efficiency standards for cars, or encouraging conservation a decade ago? Those people have done far more long-term damage. If we'd begun to work on the oil problem ten years ago, we would be in much, much better shape than we are today.
But is drill, drill, drill a solution? Will writes:
In September 2006, two U.S. companies announced that their Jack No. 2 well, in the Gulf 270 miles southwest of New Orleans, had tapped a field with perhaps 15 billion barrels of oil, which would increase America's proven reserves by 50 percent. Just probing four miles below the Gulf's floor costs $100 million. Congress's response to such expenditures is to propose increasing the oil companies' tax burdens.
Wow, that's a lot of oil! Given that the world consumes 30 billion barrels of oil today, that's a whole six-month supply of oil. The U.S. consumes about a quarter of this; it represents about two years of U.S. consumption.
Thus, the policy of drill, drill, drill only delays the problem by a few months to a few years. The only long-term solution is to switch to renewable sources of energy -- and the sooner we do it, the better.
Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!
Comments
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Tasermons Partner Posted 6:57 am
09 Jun 2008
Considerin' that most of those people are environmentalists...I doubt they were complainin' 'bout high oil prices to begin with.
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BILL HANNAHAN Posted 7:23 am
09 Jun 2008
The short term policy is drill, drill, drill. Drill in Alaska, drill offshore, and drill in the 48 states. We should also expand refinery capacity. For each barrel of new production we keep $100+ in this country, reducing the rate at which our money is the devalued. It also shows the world that we're taking action on the high cost of energy, which will tend to curtail the substantial speculative part of oil cost.
The intermediate term policy is to rapidly implement proven technology that can reduce our energy consumption, and increase supplies of clean energy substantially.
The long-term energy policy should increase R&D to $90 billion per year (only 2.25 cents/kWh) and push every technology as hard as possible. That would include building at least one full scale commercial size plant of every promising technology. Actual performance data would give companies and individuals confidence to make rapid large scale investments in new and proven technology.
We should create a totally level playing field by including all external costs and deleting all subsidies for every energy source, and allow prices to rise as necessary to meet the demand? This policy will automatically select the best energy system possible at the lowest cost.
Any one of these three approaches by itself is impractical. We need all three running in parallel at maximum capacity to solve the world's energy problems.
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Laurence Aurbach Posted 7:43 am
09 Jun 2008
Sources:
The peak oil crisis: Hyping Jack No. 2
Jack-2 and the Lower Tertiary of the Deepwater Gulf of Mexico
Chevron conquers the rock
ANWR is not the answer
Ped Shed Blog
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Sam Wells Posted 11:46 am
09 Jun 2008
I liked Bill H's response posted above. He's a realist. In the short-term we simply have no alternative. It is not helpful to say we had 25 years of a failed energy policy. We have to work our way out of the position we got ourselves in.
Unfortunately, that may include drilling in the ANWR. I don't agree with George Will's opinion but you have to admit, he is a top notch writer and a realist.
Onward through the fog
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Laurence Aurbach Posted 2:10 pm
09 Jun 2008
Panicked rhetoric about a U.S. self-destruct may stampede popular opinion into the "drill, drill, drill" option and damn the environmental risks. But even if we do that, we are still left with the question, "what next?"
Ped Shed Blog
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Russ Posted 5:50 pm
09 Jun 2008
It's the absolute refusal to recognize the war is lost, or in this case the fossil fuel orgy is OVER. It's the grim, scorched-earth determination to rip up every last piece of ground however precious, just to drag out a miserable existence for a few more measly days.
And these are supposed to be the "realists"?!
The one and only realistic thing to do is accept imminent Peak Fossil Fuel and energy descent, and the soon-to-be-accomplished fact that the growth economy and all its luxury concomitants (including useless things like tanks and helicopters - what are they good for now except to make an oil grab to protract the bunker existence? And what will they be good for once there's no oil left to grab?) will soon be swept away. There may still be time to economically devolve and politically decentralize in an organized manner, and even to build small regional renewable energy systems.
It's a choice between orderly retreat or total rout. We can do this the easier way, or the hard way. Grimly digging with bloody fingers in the dirt for droplets, driving these stupid cars until they literally run out of gas on the freeway for good, is the hard way.
As for ANWAR, Rocky Mountain shale, and other places which may have a few drops worth of oil scattered about, yet which are places of such precious natural majesty, for America to even consider defiling them for the sake of dragging out the bunker existence, is like partiers having a kegger around a bonfire. Their firewood has run out, but they do have some precious paintings, and for the sake of keeping the just a small flicker lit for a few more minutes, they'll throw the paintings on the fire. It's just simple barbarism, the barbarism of decadence (with a streak of gleeful vandalism thrown in, as we see in the case of George Will).
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Tasermons Partner Posted 12:30 am
10 Jun 2008
The only reason to increase refining capacity would be if we increase our consumption...and we should be decresing consumption, not increasing...even in the short term.
Otherwise intermediate and long-term goals become even more unobtainable.
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RevElMundo Posted 2:37 am
10 Jun 2008
George would shine, maybe.
~Rev El
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JoeyJoeJoe Posted 2:50 am
11 Jun 2008
We've never seen land use conflics like we'll see in the next few years.
Unfortunately I think this is inevitable and we need to be prepared to focus efforts on minimizing the footprint of drilling operations and maximizing the required investment in site remediation.
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