Oil drilling

[toni]

I'm posting a letter published July 17 in NWAT. These items are accessible for registered users for a few days but then go into the archive and cannot be read any more.

Re: Northwest Arkansas Times, July 9, 2011, "Womack" Increased drilling in gulf could help"
http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2011/jul/ ... tures-rise

Womack standing up for Big Oil profits

In Saturday's paper, Representative Steve Womack was quoted as saying that "increased drilling in Gulf could help" consumers hurt by high gas prices. Womack is wrong. "Drill Baby Drill" whether in the Gulf or in the Arctic won't have any noticeable effect on gas prices because the increase in oil supply that could be realized in the short or medium term is minuscule. Womack certainly knows that more drilling will only benefit the oil companies, the same corporations that realized a record 34 billion dollars in profits - almost 100 dollars per American, man woman or child - in the first three months of 2011. What American consumers need is robust investment in energy efficiency and conservation. Other advanced countries use energy *twice as efficiently* as Americans do and we could do the same if we put sound energy policies in place instead of sending our hard-earned dollars into the coffers of Big Oil executives and Middle Eastern despots.
Womack is also quoted as criticizing President Barack Obama’s “knee-jerk reaction” to the BP oil spill last year (i. e. the imposition of tighter regulation on the drilling industry). It is sad but not unexpected that Mr. Womack echos the ideology of the cult-like far right of the Republican party who will stand up for the profit interests of its corporate paymasters any time over the interests of mere citizens. The political process in America has been corrupted to the point where a company like BP can wreck the environment, cause tens of billions in damages, destroy thousands of jobs, and the next day the Republican party will clamor for more oil industry profits and higher bonuses for oil industry execs. The corrupt Republican machine, including Womack, has voted to literally take food out of the mouths of poor children (defunding WIC) while at the same time voting to uphold tens of billions of dollars in tax subsidies for the oil industry (again with the vote of Steve Womack)!
At least, one has to admit that the modern Republican party is a party of principles. Its principles are greed, recklessness, and irresponsibility.

[toni]

Northwest Arkansas Times, July 17, "More Drilling Not The Answer"
http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2011/jul/ ... -20110717/

Northwest Arkansas Times, July 21, 2011, "Drilling Must Continue"
http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2011/jul/ ... -20110721/

Northwest Arkansas Times, July 29, 2011, "Focus on Sustainable Energy"
http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2011/jul/ ... -20110729/

Terrel Shields (“Drilling must continue”, July 21) challenges my argument (NWA Times July 14) that more drilling for oil will mostly benefit the industry, not American consumers. I appreciate his response but the argument he offers boils down to "trust the oil industry". Should we really trust an industry that has a record of putting its profit interests ahead of the common good, of which the recklessness that caused the BP oil spill is just one example? I propose instead to look at the facts.

US domestic oil production peaked in 1970 and has since declined by forty percent. We now have to import about seventy percent of our crude oil. This decline is not due to a lack of drilling but due to the fundamental fact that oil is a scarce and declining resource. The most abundant, easiest accessible petroleum reserves were the first to be developed and most of them are in decline. The age of cheap oil is over and more drilling in ecologically sensitive areas won't change that. To consider an often cited example, the USGS estimates that 5-16 billion barrels of recoverable oil reserves lie under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That sounds like a lot until you realize that it represents only one to two years of US consumption!

The only plausible way of reducing dependence on foreign oil is through energy conservation and efficiency and in the longer term by making the transition to renewable energy sources. Americans consume roughly twice the amount of oil per capita than advanced nations like France, Japan, Germany, and Switzerland. As energy expert Vaclav Smil shows in his recent article America’s Oil Imports: A Self-Inflicted Burden, our inefficient energy economy is a result of choices that were made individually and politically. We can make different choices, starting with investing in a much more efficient vehicle fleet and a more efficient and accessible public transit network.

Those who still think we can drill our way out of import dependence live in a fantasy world. No amount of drilling is going to double, let alone triple, American oil production. Instead of dreaming of an oil boom long past, America needs to wake up and make the transition to the sustainable energy economy of the future.

Vaclav Smil: America’s Oil Imports: A Self-Inflicted Burden
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(4) 2011, pp. 1-5
http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/up ... 1-AAAG.pdf

[Dardedar]

Good stuff Toni. I did a presentation on this issue at a freethinker meeting back in 2008. And we showed the movie "A Crude Awakening." Rather prescient really.

See also the thread I created here which has a very useful media guide on the topic of peak oil:

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