June 22, 2008
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.