It was just over a year ago that Congress allowed a ban on offshore oil exploration to expire. In the wake of a summer featuring $4 a gallon gasoline and an angry public demanding we “drill here, drill now, and pay less” the time was ripe for increasing domestic exploration and production of oil and natural gas.
But as pump prices slowly declined from their peak and Barack Obama won the election with a promise to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, the focus for our energy solution turned from finding new oil to research into new technologies in the renewable energy field. With 2009 having come and nearly gone without another huge spike in pump prices, there hasn’t been the intensity of demand for ramping up exploration for oil and natural gas off our shores – or anywhere else domestically for that matter.
Yet other nations haven’t turned their back on black gold. A large number of newly found oilfields worldwide may push this year’s total discovery to 20 billion barrels of new reserves, the best mark since 2000. While some American oil companies are involved in these finds and will bring those fields online in coming years, they do little to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Instead, the Department of the Interior has dithered and delayed on the enactment of the most recent five-year offshore drilling plan and tacitly supported the numerous environmental groups who throw roadblocks into the process of finding oil and natural gas by demanding more impact studies. Their stalling tactics have placed a number of promising projects on the back burner and forced energy companies to go elsewhere for the supplies they need to meet our national demand.
It seems that the Obama administration’s haste to cut American carbon emissions – a process aided by our moribund economy – has led to no small amount of uncertainty among companies supplying our energy needs. It’s an uncertainty that exacerbates the oil import problem Obama pledged to solve because new technology, which certainly essential to our future needs, does little to help in the here and now. We can’t fuel those cars bought with the taxpayers’ “Cash for Clunkers” money with wind or sunshine.
Moreover, in a recessionary period where new private-sector jobs are scarce, the economic boost additional domestic oil and gas exploration can provide would aid in pulling America out of its doldrums. Each job created extracting oil or natural gas spawns other jobs in a number of service and manufacturing sectors at minimum cost to the taxpayer. In the case of offshore drilling the federal government stands to gain billions of dollars in leasing fees if exploration is allowed in areas previously off-limits.
The only thing seemingly standing in the way of a balanced approach combining increased exploration and development of America’s oil and natural gas reserves and the research and discovery of new energy technology is the lobby which believes in manmade climate change, despite the global temperature decline over the last decade. It’s that group pressing our government for concessions at the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December.
Instead of passing the Waxman-Markey or Kerry-Boxer legislation, which favors the unproven technology of renewable energy and taxes the carbon-based energy sources we rely on now, let’s step back and allow the market to prevail. The sticker shock of $4 a gallon gasoline we experienced a summer ago may be a fond memory if we place ourselves at the mercy of foreign oil suppliers without a backup plan of new exploration to see us through.
Michael Swartz is a Liberty Features Syndicate writer.
This was the thirteenth in my continuing LFS series and cleared October 22nd.
