From a New York Times editorial, 6/19/08:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/opinion/19thu1.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&oref=slogin
The Big Pander to Big Oil
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.
This 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.
There is no doubt that a lot of people have been discomfited and
genuinely hurt by $4-a-gallon gas.
But their suffering will not be relieved by drilling in restricted
areas off the coasts of New Jersey or Virginia or California.
The Energy Information Administration says that even if both coasts
were opened, prices would not begin to drop until 2030.
The only real beneficiaries will be the oil companies that are trying
to lock up every last acre of public land before their friends in
power — Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — exit the political
stage.
The whole scheme is based on a series of fictions that range from the
egregious to the merely annoying.
Democratic majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, noted the worst of
these on Wednesday:
That a country that consumes one-quarter of the world’s oil supply but
owns only 3 percent of its reserves can drill its way out of any
problem — whether it be high prices at the pump or dependence on oil
ex****ted by unstable countries in Persian Gulf.
This fiction has been resisted by Barack Obama but foolishly embraced
by John McCain, who seemed to be making some sense on energy questions
until he jumped aboard the lift-the-ban bandwagon on Tuesday.
A lesser fiction, perpetrated by the oil companies and, to some
extent, by misleading government figures, is that huge deposits of oil
and gas on federal land have been closed off and industry has had one
hand tied behind its back by environmentalists, Democrats and the
offshore protections in place for 25 years.
The numbers suggest otherwise.
Of the 36 billion barrels of oil believed to lie on federal land,
mainly in the Rocky Mountain West and Alaska, almost two-thirds are
accessible or will be after various land-use and environmental
reviews.
And of the 89 billion barrels of recoverable oil believed to lie
offshore, the federal Mineral Management Service says fourth-fifths is
open to industry, mostly in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan waters.
Clearly, the oil companies are not starved for resources.
Further, they do not seem to be doing nearly as much as they could
with the land to which they’ve already laid claim.
Separate studies by the House Committee on Natural Resources and the
Wilderness Society, a conservation group, show that roughly
three-quarters of the 90 million-plus acres of federal land being
leased by the oil companies onshore and off are not being used to
produce energy.
That is 68 million acres altogether, among them potentially highly
productive leases in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.
With that in mind, four influential House Democrats — Edward Markey,
Nick Rahall, Rahm Emanuel and Maurice Hinchey — have introduced “use
it or lose it” bills that would force the companies to begin
exploiting the leases they have before getting any more.
Companion bills have been introduced in the Senate, where suspicions
also run high that industry’s main objective is to stockpile millions
of additional acres of public land before the Bush administration
leaves town.
This cannot be allowed to happen.
The Congressional moratoriums on offshore drilling were put in place
in 1981 and reaffirmed by subsequent Congresses to protect coastal
economies that depend on clean water and clean coastlines.
This was also the essential purpose of supplemental executive orders,
the first of which was issued by Mr. Bush’s father in 1990 after the
disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill the year before.
Given the huge resources available to the energy industry, there is no
reason to undo these protections now.
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"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts."
Albert Einstein
Harry
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