Today, as you all know, the administration decided to open up a significant portion of federal waters in the southeastern United States to oil drilling. I have a lot of problems with this decision, including but not limited to:
- The decision probably not going to encourage actual exploration and production off of the coasts, given that most federal lands open to oil and gas exploration have not been used since they were opened. Drill baby drill? Exxon Mobil doesn't feel like it.
- There is no guarantee that this oil and its distillates would be used in the United States and ease our oil addiction one bit.
And most importantly, I am not defending the President or Secretary Salazar. I think they have made the wrong move.
But the simple fact is this: we cannot get rid of oil in the near term.
We cannot pretend that there is an alternative to oil at scale for transportation fuels in the US. Even plug in hybrids, which I think are likely to begin to gain favor as an alternative to both low-range electric cars and fully-gasoline powered cars, need oil. I think it would make even less sense to use natural gas for cars, because the glut of it is temporary, and the price does not reflect increased demand that is experienced in a well-oiled (pardon the pun) economy.
Not only that, the vast majority of clean energy technologies are used to create electricity for power, with the exception of cellulosic/algal biofuels (which are entirely incompatible with existing pipeline infrastructure and would require all new private investment).
However, one of the most hypocritical things that I see on my side of the ideological debate is the absolute, blunt refusal to allow oil drilling to occur in the United States, be it near the coasts, in the mountains, or in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. So you would rather contain the groundwater pollution to the poor people in Venezuela who live along the Orinoco belt? You would rather a bunch of poor, uneducated Arabs or poor uneducated Nigerians would have to suffer from the flaring of natural gas RIGHT NEXT TO THEIR VILLAGES?
If we're going to use dirty energy, we have to OWN it if we are moral people.
And not only that, Saudi Arabia, our biggest supplier, is an active supporter of Wahhabist Islamic fundamentalists. Like the Vatican, they support a prodigious chain of madrassahs that have produced members of al-Qaeda and both directly and indirectly funded their activities.
So you don't think we shouldn't be trying to take money out of the pockets of corrupt Saudi princes that ultimately send the money to fundamentalist radicals and even terrorists?
I agree with some of the opposition to this decision, but I cannot stomach opposition that isn't steeped in the reality that we are at a minimum of 20-50 years away from weaning ourselves off of oil entirely, ignores the national security risk of our addiction to imported oil and does not particularly care that we are limiting the environmental damage to oil-producing states.
I want the US to have a comprehensive energy and climate strategy very badly, and we must be doing everything we can to get alternative vehicle drive systems out there as quickly as possible. But quite frankly, no strategy is comprehensive if we don't try to drill for our at least some more of our own oil than we are now. Thanks for listening.