The Disingenuousness of Democrats When It Comes to Oil
In line with a couple of recent posts (here and here) regarding the opening of the outer continental shelf to drilling, my friend Andrew Langer over at the Institute for Liberty sent me this piece.
As I noted earlier, the biggest argument against drilling being put forth by the likes of Sen. Joe Biden, Sen. Ben Cardin, and myriad other Dems is that opening the shelf to drilling will bring “no immediate price relief”. Andrew notes the hypocrisy:
Furthermore, it is disingenuous to suggest that simply because the oil wouldn’t be available immediately, it represents no immediate relief. If the oil futures markets are greatly responsible for the high cost of oil per barrel, ensuring a supply of oil from a stable source would go a long way towards ameliorating uncertainty.
And besides, the same people who are saying that because it won’t be available immediately, we shouldn’t do it, are the same people who a dozen years ago were saying that we shouldn’t drill in ANWR because that oil wouldn’t come into the marketplace for a decade.
The American people could have used that oil two years ago, and they could certainly be using it now.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if we could wave a magic wand and oil would sprout from ANWR and the outer continental shelf we would hear a new set of arguments. We need to remember that many of these same people arguing against new domestic drilling are the same ones riding around in private jets (like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of the Waterkeeper Alliance) who tell the rest of us that we should be riding in glorified scooters and be thankful to pay $4 at the pump.
cross posted at Red Maryland
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Comments
A) The “futures” markets are all about predicting what might happen sometime down the road. What many who are driving these spikes are betting on is that certain small aspects of the supply might be in doubt, and that therefore the stability of the supply is questionable. Ameliorate these concerns, and the price comes down;
B) You can cherry-pick figures all you want, but the fact is, estimates for ANWR, OCS, shale oil, etc are much higher:
MMS (Minerals Managment Service) estimates that there are nearly 16 BILLION barrels of oil under the currently-inaccessible areas of OCS. Another 10.4 billion barrels are under ANWR. And roughly 2 TRILLION barrels in oil shale (source for that last: National Energy Technology Laboratory).
That’s a hell of a lot of oil.
Saying that drilling to increase supply won’t help in an artificially-created oil supply crisis is like saying that growing more food won’t help reduce hunger or that earning and saving more money won’t reduce someone’s debt.
- Andrew Langer
I’m not by any means a “leftie”, and I’m not American so I don’t really care what the Republicans and Democrats say. All I’m interested in are the facts, and here’s what puzzles me… what oil are you going to drill for? The Department of Energy Information’s own reports say that the ANWR reserve would come on stream in 2018, contains in total about what the U.S. uses on 4 months, and would drop oil prices by a few cents per barrel. The off shore reserves would, again according to the government, come fully online by 2030, and would only produce about 200,000 barrels per day, about 1% of your usage or about 10% of what you import from Saudi Arabia.
Given that, I’m lost as to how exactly anyone thinks that domestic drilling is going to help. I’m not completely against drilling in principle, I just don’t understand this “meme” that’s rushing round the internet, with people claiming that sinking a few holes in the ground is going to solve the energy crisis (http://layscience.net/?q=node/156).