Stoopid Stuff

Drilling for Dummies

So American Politics has finally hit bottom. All lies and pandering, all the time. It's rapidly approaching the point where both campaigns will be running entirely fact-free campaigns by the debates.

There's suddenly a whole bunch of political heat around domestic oil exploration and drilling. Not just ANWR these days, but offshore. Offshore drilling has been a political non-starter for decades. There's two reasons why it's a ridiculous idea at this point.

First, what problem are you trying to solve? Sure, we're running out of oil globally, and with the increasing demand from the developing nations, particularly India and China, that trend can only accelerate. But the amount of oil available on the market is greater than or equal to demand. We are not in a shortage situation, where we need more crude to meet demand. No, apparently the goal is purely political - have some impact on retail gasoline and home heating oil prices before the presidential election.

Lets interject a few quick facts into this debate:

• It takes YEARS to bring a new oil platform on line
• There are no available oil rigs - they are all in use
• The oil companies don't give us a discount on American Oil
• America's reserves are so tiny as to have NO discernable impact on prices
• The problem is not additional crude - without additional refining capacity, there's nothing we could do with it but sell it to foreign nations anyway
  

It's not difficult to understand the way the international oil market functions, at least on a macro level. John McCain just thinks you're as stupid and uninterested as he is. Barack Obama has given up, and decided John McCain is right about you.

Second, and by far most importantly, oil is NOT the solution. Oil, and gas and particularly coal, is the PROBLEM. We're actively and rapidly killing the planet. If our current economic uncomforatability causes us to pump more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, are we really bringing anything resembling a solution to bear?

If you believe, as I do, that high oil prices are not a temporary economic anomaly, but rather a new reality that will be with us forever, then tinkering around the margins in an attempt to lower retail gasoline prices will not accomplish anything of value. If you can artificially drive prices from $4.25 to $3.75 temporarily, without doing anything to restructure the fundamentally unsustainable underlying economy, you have actually made the situation worse.

One of the things I find amusing in the debate is that the new offshore rigs, even if we authorize them today, would come online in the 2012-2014 time frame. Now setting aside any economic or political consideration, the pace of the effects of Global Climate change seems to be much faster than originally anticipated, and it also seems to be accelerating. That being the case, it's very possible that in five years, in the name of our own survival, humanity may well have enacted draconian anti-fossil-fuel laws that would make any additional oil production meaningless at that point.

And the alternative view, that the world will be just as desperate for fossil fuels in 2015 as it is today, is even more frightening and dystopian. What might a world of 2020 look like if we don't reduce our carbon output? Not even to mention our nitrogen problem, our oceans problem, our water problem.

If you are under 40 years old and this does not terrify you, I simply don't understand what you are thinking about. The parallel disasters of economics and pollution are going to swarm our civilization in the next ten years. There may be NO hope. But whatever hope there is is fully predicated on taking very serious action NOW, making the changes and sacrifices necessary to pass on a world that provides for it's population in a sustainable way. NOW. Not in a few years, not after the super bowl, not after our daughter graduates. NOW.

People are sleeping. The planet is dying. I can't be the only one who thinks you'll deserve what you inherit...

posted by mikey @ 11:47 AM