Well, at least there is one adult looking at energy policy in the government.
To my friends on the left I would say, grow up. It currently takes around 19 million barrels of crude oil per day to run the United States of America. In energy terms that is equivalent to 32.3 million Watt hrs of electricity. You show me where we get that kind of energy on demand and I will listen to you. I defer to no one regarding an understanding of solar energy but Nevada and a boatload of silicon doesn't count. I want to know where the means of production is coming from. Where the storage is going to materialize. How you manage this instantaneous conversion from liquid fuels to an electrified transportation fleet and on and on. No, there is no escaping the box we have gotten ourselves into.
So, you say "we import our oil. Why not leave our oil in the ground where it will benefit future generations?" Well, that is a fine argument from the side of the aisle that claims to stake out the moral high ground. Let's make the rest of the world shoulder the environmental impact of our addiction. Let's make Africa and the Middle East and South and Central America suffer the risk of oil spills to feed our driving habits so that we can be sure that the coast of Virginia and Florida will be forever off limits to drilling.
And to my foils on the right. You have managed to convince the rubes that there are vast untapped energy resources just waiting to be exploited within our borders. Enough to make us energy independent. Enough to moderate the price of gasoline. You know that this is a lie. You know that if every environmentally sensitive region including ANWAR were to be opened for full development tomorrow the best that we could hope for is a minor increase in production that would have absolutely no impact in terms of reducing gasoline prices. None. You know that the only people who would actually profit by such a move would be the companies who gained the leases. And of course the governments that got the fees.
U.S. domestic crude production has managed to stay on a very long plateau since it peaked in 1978 due in large measure to the ingenuity of independent domestic producers in the oil patch learning how to get more out of wells that are past their peak in production. But that process is not infinite. If this plateau is going to be maintained going forward in the face of depletion, we are going to have to add our deep water resources from the least environmentally sensitive areas that are currently off limits. This is not about any promise of significantly increasing the daily domestic production capacity. It is about recognizing the daunting reality of what it will take to prevent it from collapsing.
Looking at this as a triumph of practicality over renewables is stupid. We are in a resource constrained era. We can no longer afford the luxury of 'either or' thinking. This is a problem that is so fundamental and so acute that we have to be willing to throw everything we have at it. Oil is in decline. We are going to have to run faster just to stay in place. This is a measure designed to help us run faster. We will be lucky to stay in place for very long. We are still going to need the alternatives faster than we are likely to develop them. If we are going to prosper going forward we are going to have to break the historic link between GDP and fossil fuel consumption. Because there is no more basis upon which that future growth can be predicated. This has devastating implications for the debt that has already been issued and is one of the primary sources of our current economic instability.
Make no mistake there are serious liquid fuel shortages looming on the horizon. A large fraction of the population, not just the wingnuts have already bought into the notion that one of the reasons that we are resource constrained is because of the large areas that are off limits to development. If something isn't done to dispell or counter that notion and it becomes conventional wisdom, when the effects of the liquid fuels shortages hit, anyone who supported these restrictions will be politically dead meat. One of the ways that we can educate the public on this issue is to use the oil companies. Essentially call their bluff. Force them to do the exploration in as environmentally responsible manner as possible so that we have a thorough inventory of what is there. Then we can have real fact based empirical arguments regarding the causes of the shortages and whether or not they could have been prevented by more domestic drilling. Blanket prohibitions against exploration make it too easy for the other side to demigod this issue and lie about it. Opening up some of the less sensitive areas to exploration amounts to calling their bluff.
I think it is regrettable that the debate has deteriorated to this point but we have already lost the public on this issue. We have to win them back and the best way to do that is to make a good faith effort to at least go through the process of accounting for what we do have so that they can't be lied to anymore. Yes, there are environmental risks associated with this. But we have fucked up the public information function at this point and I can see no other way to turn it around.