President Bush's call to expand domestic oil drilling is misguided. Today's high oil prices are an opportunity to develop alternative energies and to improve energy efficiency.
Oil is a finite resource. Alternatives must be found eventually. We should endeavor to transition to alternative energy sources on our own terms rather than struggling to maintain high levels of consumption for as long as possible.
In a crisis, we can always turn to offshore drilling and drilling in ANWR. In the absence of a real energy crisis, our energy policy should be to allow oil prices to remain high so we can transition to alternatives in an orderly fashion of a period of decades. If we attempt to sustain our current consumption until the last bit of accessible oil is extracted, the inevitable transition to alternatives will be much more painful.
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I agree with your post. I think there is much more to be said on that topic. As a Peak Oil believer (meaning I believe we have already passed global oil production peak), I would like to add a couple points:
ReplyDelete- It is already too late to solve energy crisis by drilling. There are geological constraints that will prevent us to extend our wasteful energy consumption. The process of drilling (even if it turns out to be successful at the end) takes many years. We are months away from serious energy crisis. Alternatives are not going to make timely and scalable substitute for declining oil production. We will be forced to drastically reduce our energy consumption soon (it will be question of affordability and availability).
- Oil is cheap even at today’s $135+ price per barrel. We wasted one half of this finite resource in mere hundred years. It took millions of years for oil to form and we never appreciated how precious oil was. We still continue to waste oil and we are yet to understand oil’s real value once it disappears from our lives.
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.
ReplyDeleteThis 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.