The intellectually barren offshore drilling debate
At least one of Matt Simmons's forecasts is not yet bearing fruit — his 2006 prediction that Peak Oil would come to dominate the 2008 campaign. For the debate over offshore drilling that's erupted this week has shed absolutely no light on the real issues.
For starters, there's a highly disingenuous calculus behind the flip-flops of John McCain and Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who now favor offshore drilling: They're sending a message, implicit but unmistakable [Update: Actually, it's completely explicit] , that allowing more offshore drilling will somehow put a voter's Labor Day getaway this year, heretofore unaffordable, within reach. It will, of course, do no such thing.
That does not put Barack Obama and the Democrats in the right, however. Obama, who has previously framed the issue of energy with highly inflammatory rhetoric, misrepresents what's at stake when he says, "We can't drill our way out of this problem."
That much is true. But drilling can make a problem whose severity neither he nor McCain will acknowledge a little easier to handle. It will make possible, say, $13 gas in 2015 instead of $14 gas. That will buy a little more time for science and business to develop whatever non-hydrocarbon source of transportation fuel is in our future. Because it's not going to happen next year, or maybe even next decade, no matter how much politicians of both parties talk about an "Apollo program" to develop alternative energy sources, which would no doubt meet with as much success as Jimmy Carter's "synfuels" program. (Betcha forgot about that one.)
The intellectual desert that is the energy debate in this country is laid bare by a single sentence in today's New York Times wrap-up on the drilling debate. "It is likely to exacerbate the 30-year-old standoff in Washington over whether domestic drilling or conservation is the way to end American dependence on foreign oil."
Memo to Washington: "Energy independence" is a chimera. It's not even necessarily desirable if it were even possible, which it is not. Let the market do its thing, and we'll rapidly find that both domestic drilling and conservation will be essential to making the transition away from oil-based transportation fuel. Note I did not say a smooth transition. That is not in the cards. But it will be a bit less bumpy. It's the best we can hope for.
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‘”Energy independence” is a chimera. It’s not even necessarily desirable if it were even possible, which it is not.’
There you go again with that globalist - interdependence nonsense. Being independent of the Middle East, Venezuela, Mexico, etc., for our energy needs wouldn’t be desirable?
Maybe in your deluded, Libertarian bizarro world it wouldn’t. But for the rest of us it sure would be.
Comment on June 18, 2008 @ 5:31 pm
To Thomas Miller
You will be ” energy independent” from Middle East, Venezuela when you will lay 6 feet under! In the mean time you can became ” energy independent” when you will ride the bike, stop using electrical appliances and grow up your own food in your back yard!
Becoming ” energy independent” from Mexico will happen in three or four years, and that not because we will not gonn’a want their oil - will be because in about that time frame Mexico will became an oil IMPORTER! (like Indonesia)
Anyway, till then better keep your mouth shut…and enjoy your stupid issolationist ideeas in silence…
Comment on June 19, 2008 @ 12:29 am
Hey, Mario. It is very easy to tell someone better keep their mouth shut from behind a keyboard. Free speech is okay as long as it does not impinge on your STUPID globist sugarplum dreams, eh?
Brazil has energy independence now and the US could if it wanted to do so. There are so many side games going in this crap that it is amazing to me how ANYTHING gets done.
The number one goal of all this globalization crap is the bringing about a one world government. Well, I am not a citizen of the world, I am an AMERICAN citizen. The rest of the world can live as it sees fit with no interference from me as long as they see fit to accord me the same courtesy. Now THERE is a dream. What are the odds of the rest of the world leaving me to live my life as I please when I got Liberal-Lefty on one side and NeoCon-Nazi on the other who will not leave me the F*** alone? Huh? Answer me that since you are so teddibly, teddibly brilliant, sir.
Am I an isolationist? Naw, I love free trade. But you cannot have free trade at the same time you have a Federally mandated minimum wage or a significant portion of the society deciding they have a CONSTITUTIONAL right to part of my paycheck and free healthcare because some government is ALWAYS willing to run its own people into the ground in order to increase personal luxury of current rulers or to increase their influence or ownership of territory.
As for energy independence, what do you think will happen to the power structures in a country when the people are able to pull all the energy they need from their rooftops or by taking advantage of the temperature differential of the surface and hundreds of feet into the earth? “Oh my, impossible! is the cry.”
It was impossible to fly, go to the moon, and run a four minute mile, too.
…and if we were to be able to pull this impossibility off you can damn well bet that the developers of such technology would be shot in the head in the middle of the night because debt, power, food and healthcare are much more powerful tools for controlling the populations.
Now, Dave, has written a good post and I appreciate his view. But until we get a true market economy, Manipulated from neither the left nor the right, we will continue to have booms, busts, misallocation of and seizures of capital and hardship on the people.
You were out of line to call this fellows ideas stupid and for him to shut up and be ignorant in silence. You personal ignorance (as well as mine I am sure) will reveal itself in due time. Since we are ALL signed on here we are all looking for the same things. We can afford to and should be civil. Civility is free and the ROI is infinite.
Comment on June 19, 2008 @ 8:21 am
…and to Dave, I could be wrong about suspecting that America could be energy independent if it wanted to be. With coal to oil technology, geothermal and nuclear…I think it COULD be done IF we had the collective will to do so.
Which has nothing to do with investing and making money, does it? Real or contrived, peak oil is how we have to play it, so I appreciate your column here.
ARE the technologies I mentioned significant? I think so. What if I am wrong? Then I lose money.
Chuckle…it is not a problem to get information. The problem is not necessarily vetting the information. The trick it seems to me is understanding what the collective market sees as valid information. Until oil either falls in price (plenty of oil) or the gas stations start closing up and mass upheavals occur (peak oil.)
Then again I could still not be seeing things correctly. This must be what someone realizing they are going blind must feel like.
Anyways, good luck to us all.
Comment on June 19, 2008 @ 8:42 am
Tim, maybe I should have been a bit clearer. “Energy independence” is a chimera if it entails a continued reliance on oil for transportation fuel. And that’s the unspoken assumption behind most of the yakking in Washington, which is what I was addressing primarily.
Comment on June 19, 2008 @ 9:13 am
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Pingback on June 19, 2008 @ 11:31 am
Remember first year algebra class? If you have a problem you can’t solve, trade it for a problem you can solve.
We already have huge areas on the continental shelf leased out with no drilling, because all the drilling platforms in the world are booked and have drills turning left at better locations to drill than those leased areas.
We could build shipyards to build drilling rigs, and steel mills, and tube mills for the drill pipe, etc. And take several years to do it, too.
We need liquid fuels. To get liquid fuels, you take some of the methane (that we are using to make electricity) and make syngas, then take the syngas and make methanol to use for gasoline or dimethylether for diesel.
Great, we have traded the first problem for another problem. Now what do we do to get more electricity?
We build lots of concentrating solar photovoltaic. That means we use mirrors to concentrate sunlight on silicon solar cells, and since we are concentrating the sunlight 1000x, we get 3,000 megawatts of sunlight power (for eight hours during the day) instead of 3 megawatts of sunlight power every day from our silicon solar cell production used in roof panels. That’s a third of our natural gas usage right there.
We have to cover the deserts with solar power facilities, but it’s no worse than covering the oceans with drilling rigs, and a lot faster. No shipyards needed, just sheet metal pressing and assembly facilities that are much simpler to set up and use.
Comment on June 20, 2008 @ 11:25 pm
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Pingback on June 23, 2008 @ 10:30 am
[...] week, the idiocy surrounding the debate over offshore oil drilling convinced me that Matt Simmons's prediction about Peak Oil issues dominating the 2008 campaign had not yet [...]
Pingback on June 25, 2008 @ 9:34 am
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