All the recent exchanges about leases, drilling offshore and oil companies and energy policy obscures some fundamental points. The world is in a race against depletion of a fundamentally important resource and that depletion goes on constantly and unremittingly. Without this understanding, the discussion of our energy policy will remain delusional at best and actively destructive at worst.
We delude ourselves by the very topics of our discussion about energy and the terms that we use. We are in reaching a sufficiently critical state that the choice between drilling and not drilling is but a minor and meaningless correction to our current course.
The world is in a race against energy resource depletion. We are currently almost completely dependent on petroleum for transportation and by extension agriculture, trade, and infrastructure maintenance. Notwithstanding the fact that the U.S. is highly wasteful in its usage of oil, this dependency is still fundamental to industrial civilization.
To use another analogy, consider civilization as men who once walked on the ground. Successive technological and social advances had elevated us slightly higher above the ground by the beginning of the 19th century, (and in some cases unsustainably from a local perspective). It was fossil fuels and industrialization that launched us sky high on a globally unsustainable trajectory. Now we have accrued six billion passengers, one billion of which are proportionally much heavier than the rest. (Unlike the rockets launched by NASA, the payload of ours keeps increasing even after launch) We also don't quite know how much of that fuel is left in the tank, but we know it is finite and that the flow rate of the fuel will also decline, possibly soon. We know also that the other fossil fuel sources cannot fully make up for the loss of oil.
Our only alternative is to attempt use every resource that we have our disposal to reach a sustainable orbit. Attempts to keep business as usual for as long as possible will make this more difficult and perhaps impossible. Whether we drill or not, whether we conserve or not, we must face the fact that the fuel for our vehicle is dwindling each day that passes.
Some will say, why don't we just conserve? After all if the U.S. is so wasteful, we should be able to reach E.U. levels of oil consumption per capita without a fundamental reduction of our lifestyle. This is true, and conservation will be necessary and fundamental. Yet it does not change the fact that the depletion of oil will continue regardless. The first fifty percent in reduction is the easy part, the next fifty-- not so easy. And the next? Depletion doesn't just stop because you've achieved some arbitrary benchmark.
What about developing economies? Understandably, China and other developing economies will be attempting to boost themselves higher along with, and we have given them no other tools except to do what the U.S. and the rest of world have used, nor have we provided an example of what else might be done. They do not have time to invent the future, not with the huge population payload which they are attempting to lift.
So what does achieving orbit mean? What sustainable trajectories our civilization can actually achieve remains unclear. It is likely to be radically different than the trajectory we are on now. But unless we try to find it, it will likely never find us. The U.S. can either be dead weight, dragging down the rest of the world and increasing the chances of a crash landing, or we can begin to play a constructive role.
The immediate steps the U.S. must take are clear and have been written about extensively by many. We must pursue a full range of both sustainable energy sources and sources that will bridge the gaps such as nuclear. We must realize that the degradation of the environment will magnify manifold the problems in feeding ourselves just as the conventional assumptions about energy-intensive agriculture begin to break down. We must realign and retool our transportation system and cities along electrical transit. We must address both future population and the resource consumption of our current population. We must make sure that the fossil energy that we will inevitably burn is precious and must be used to make contributions to this tremendous effort. We must realize that the effort will be multigenerational and that there will be no real respite from it, since energy depletion and exhaustion do not sleep so long as we draw from those same tanks. We must find a way to an economic system that does not depend on unending growth and consumption even as we use the capitalistic system that we have now.
What will become critical is not how much oil and energy the world uses (since we are likely to use what we can when we can) but how and what we use it on. The energy used will either contribute to achieving orbit, or it will be wasted.
But above all we must strive to fully realize the fact that we are in fact in a race against depletion and ultimately exhaustion of finite resources, not just of oil, but of coal, natural gas and the environment itself. This is a political and cultural education that goes against so many of the values and assumptions accrued over the centuries of expansionism and empire, but without this understanding, we will remain mired in delusion until it is too late.