Energy — the Non-Issue?

Energy — the Non-Issue?

by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner

The following entries on The Corner are a collection of VDH's thought
on our energy troubles.

I don't quite understand why one party or the other doesn't campaign
on delivering more energy to the American people to lower costs, keep
the world price down, and money out of the hands of terrorists, and to
address U.S. debt and the falling dollar. There seems no contradiction
between wanting nuclear power, clean coal, tar and shale, more
drilling off our coasts and Alaska — and more conservation, more money
for hydrogen, biofuels, more solar, wind, etc.

But unfortunately the former seems to be the more conservative
position, the latter the more liberal, when in fact they hardly are
incompatible, since the first is the short-term solution that ensures
we don't go bankrupt and empower our enemies as we evolve toward the
long-term answers. Nothing could be more populist than trying to
deliver affordable energy; but it's a position that so far neither
candidate is addressing — maybe because Obama's base is still anti-
nuclear and against drilling; and McCain is almost indistinguishable
from him on the coasts and ANWR. One otherwise would have thought that
energy would be the critical issue of the campaign, and instead —
relative silence from both on stump?

1/2 a million barrels, yes -- 1 million, no?

I am confused: for years we were told that the projected 1 million
barrels per day from ANWR would be simply too small to make much of a
difference given our 20-million-barrel a day appetite — and therefore
not worth the environmental risk. Now we wait in tense anticipation
for a Saudi willingness to pump an extra 1/2 million per day (from
where and how we apparently simply don't care), which we hope will
send a message that world supply and demand might be in better sync to
cut the feet out from under speculators. So how can 500,000 barrels
now do what a million once could not?

More Energy Questions

Why is the U.N. holding conferences about rising food prices, but not
spiraling oil prices that in various ways account for them? Somehow in
the globalist mindset the agricultural producing world is more
culpable than the non-productive OPEC world. But we should remember
that it requires skill, ingenuity, and a certain craft to produce
enough food to feed one's country and export the surplus, and none of
the above to pump oil, an accident of nature that it is beneath one's
feet, and, in the case of most of OPEC, a commodity and infrastructure
that someone else found, developed and even now mostly maintains.

And why are Republicans, who voted in overwhelming numbers for off-
shore drilling, ANWR, nuclear, shale, tar sands, liquid coal, etc. —
and were opposed by Democrats on grounds of wanting to enrich energy
companies — not appealing to the country to develop domestic supplies
on the basis of fairness (the poor have the least access to energy
efficient homes and hybrid, fuel efficient new cars), the environment
(the U.S. can extract oil, in a fungible market, far more cleanly than
Russia or the Middle East), and national security (most of OPEC,
Russia, Venezuela are belligerents and becoming more dangerous the
more trillions of dollars the West, China, and Japan transfer to them
in their hard-won national wealth)?

It is a ready-made issue for them, and with skill can appeal to
Americans of every persuasion who are starting to snicker when Obama
soars in pie-in-the-sky sermons about wind, solar, and millions of new
jobs in green energy. Maybe — but back on planet America until we get
there the working class is going to be paying a day or two per week of
their wages to fuel their second-hand cars, while the
environmentalists will buy new Priuses and an on-demand water heater
for their tasteful homes. One would have thought the President, who
was on the right side of these production issues, would give a
national address calling for a bipartisan effort to produce energy to
get us through these hard times, or Republican senators would now be
reintroducing energy legislation almost daily.

But given the current conservative ineptness, $5-a-gallon gas will be
blamed on the war, or lack of federal subsidies to solar, or the oil
companies, and not the elite agenda of utopians who were not willing
to do what was necessary for the collective good to help us transition
through to new fuels.

Drilling and Our Collective Madness

There is something pathetic about Americans begging the House of Saud
to produce another 300,000-500,000 barrels of oil per day, while in
mindless fashion repeating the mantra, “We can’t drill our way out of
this problem” — as if anyone suggested absolute oil independence was
the goal rather than more supply to deflate tight conditions that
encourage speculation. Americans, who invented the oil industry, are
beginning to resemble H.G. Wells’ Eloi in our refined paralysis.

Exploration and oil production are an issue that is absolutely
explosive for Democrats, given their perennial resistance to ANWR,
coastal and deep ocean drilling, tar sands, shale, liquid coal, and
nuclear power. And the irony is that their opposition to drilling —
dismissing each potential find or field with the reductionist “it
would be only 500,000 barrels,” “a mere million barrels,” or “just a
few cents off a gallon of gas” — is classically illiberal to the point
of either callousness or abject madness.

Consider:

(1) Social Justice: The poorer, inordinately in far cheaper 2nd-hand
used, gas guzzlers, who have less access to pricey new hybrids and
imported small cars, are hurt the most, especially those in rural
communities without mass transit.

(2) The Environment: Given the demands of two billion users in China
and India, the world is going to go after oil, whether we like it or
not. U.S. oil companies and American environmental legislation are the
most ecologically friendly in the world. Each time we refuse to pump a
barrel of oil, someone else in this fungible market will — and with
far less concern for the health of planet Earth. Again, there is
something appalling in de facto saying to others — “Drill off your
coasts and in your fragile deserts and beside your lakes so I can fuel
my Lexus SUV and Volvo — and cherish the comforting thought I would
never do that in my ANWR.”

(3) National Security: At $140 a barrel of oil we have little
influence in warning the world about Iranian nukes, or Middle-East
money leaking to Islamic terrorists, or Saudi-funded madrassas, or the
cynicism of Hugo Chavez or Russian strong-arm tactics toward Europe;
at less than $50 the world begins to appear far less dangerous and far
more rational.

(4) Financial Sanity: U.S. exporters are doing brilliantly, with help
from a weak dollar, but our efforts to produce and sell abroad are
increasingly all for naught, given the enormous cost of imported oil.
Each time we invest American know-how and expertise in selling abroad
a skip-loader or bushel of wheat or new software program that once
explained our national wealth, we simply buy another barrel of foreign
oil at $140 that often costs the far-less-adept less than $5 to pump.
In contrast, the tens of billions we would save by even shaving 3 to 4
million barrels per day from our imported appetites would radically
redefine both our trade balances and the dollar.

(5) Alternate Fuels/New Energies: No one is talking any more about the
return of Hummers and Escalades or a mythical $2-a-gallon gas. Rather,
with demand down, and the public aware that oil is finite and will
remain tight, drilling provides a needed window to transition us to
electrical plug-ins, biofuels, fuel cells, etc. without endangering
our national security — or going broke or seeing a nuke go off in the
Middle East.

(6) Food versus Fuel: I don’t understand in moral terms how worrying
about the terrain in 2,000 acres in a multimillion-acre Alaska trumps
diverting one-fifth to one-fourth of our corn acreage away from animal
and human foods to produce transportation fuel. People worldwide are
in dire straits, given rising food prices, while we, in anti-
humanistic fashion, complain about the view from Santa Barbara or a
herd on the tundra.

Our current stasis reminds me of Jack Hawkins last words in The Bridge
Over the River Kwai — “Madness! Madness!”

Californication: An Example Not to Follow

One of the hallmarks of the elite California mind-set has been to stop
production, whether energy or agricultural, without any concern of the
consequences on less fortunate others — and often to do so by judicial
mandate or by legislative blockage.

So our representatives and judges have ensured that we won't build
refineries, though we have the most cars per state in the country. We
won't drill off our coasts although to do so might have made our state
almost energy independent. We won't build nuclear power plants or
raise our dams for more hydroelectric power, although we have been
plagued in the past by rolling blackouts and burning high-priced
imported natural gas. And we impose environmental regulations with no
thought or care how average people can have access to water or fuel.

Here's the latest from the New York Times on our current drought, sort
of an environmental version of our recent gay marriage judicial
ruling:

Even more significant, a judge in federal district court last year
issued a curtailment in pumping from the California Delta — where the
Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers meet and provide water to roughly 25
million Californians — to protect a species of endangered smelt that
were becoming trapped in the pumps. Those reductions, from December to
June, cut back the state’s water reserves this winter by about one
third, according to a consortium of state water boards.

©2008 Victor Davis Hanson


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