Arkady
President
Oil prices are now $27 per barrel. And with Iranian supply coming online, and China's economy weak, they're likely to stay pretty low for quite a while. This is a great time for the US to buy up oil to top off our strategic oil reserves for a rainy day. It would also be a good time to institute a gas tax linked to commodity prices, bringing in some deficit-reducing revenues now and allowing for later counter-cyclical price cuts when prices rise again. Hopefully it also gets people to think through the supposed logic of the "drill baby, drill" push to exhaust our natural oil reserves as quickly as possible.
Think about it: at a time when we can be burning OTHER PEOPLE's oil at ultra-low prices, would it really be a good idea to be burning up our own non-renewable resources? The case for keeping as much of that oil in the ground as we can, right now, has always been strong. Think of those natural oil deposits as the ultimate strategic oil reserve: a way to hold onto massive amounts of oil, securely and in an environmentally stable way, at zero cost. That oil is likely to appreciate in the ground, and to be much more in demand in the future, when economically recoverable reserves have been used up elsewhere. Also, in the future, improved drilling techniques will mean more of that energy can be recovered at lower cost and with less negative environmental fallout than if we drilled it today (think, for example, of the vast amount of natural gas we wasted in the past when it was simply flared off as a waste product). And the longer we can postpone tapping it, the more economic bang per gallon we're likely to get, since the tendency has been for economies to get more and more energy efficient with time (e.g., you can drive an average car much farther on a gallon of gas today than you could with the same gallon in 1960, and you can light a house with LEDs for a lot less energy today than it would have taken you with incandescents just a few years ago).
Also keep in mind that even setting aside the climate-change arguments, there's case to be made that we owe it to future generations not to tap those reserves today. We're going to be leaving them a pretty serious set of problems to address, and a pretty bare cupboard of tools to use. The least we can do is leave them some economically recoverable oil in the ground. The longer we delay tapping those reserves, the more of the work our generation will do of finding complementary energy sources and more efficient ways to use the energy. If you're going to leave future generations with massive debt and a seriously depleted environment, you should at least leave them some key natural resources like oil that haven't yet been exhausted.
You'll notice the Republicans aren't talking much lately about the need to decimate ANWR, drill marine preserves, and build a sludge pipeline across the US. The "drill baby, drill" slogan just isn't getting the same mileage it does when people are feeling the pinch at the pump. But even once prices start to rise again, we should remember the case against tapping our natural reserves prematurely. When we can get more value from those reserves the longer we wait to tap them, the rush just doesn't make sense.
Think about it: at a time when we can be burning OTHER PEOPLE's oil at ultra-low prices, would it really be a good idea to be burning up our own non-renewable resources? The case for keeping as much of that oil in the ground as we can, right now, has always been strong. Think of those natural oil deposits as the ultimate strategic oil reserve: a way to hold onto massive amounts of oil, securely and in an environmentally stable way, at zero cost. That oil is likely to appreciate in the ground, and to be much more in demand in the future, when economically recoverable reserves have been used up elsewhere. Also, in the future, improved drilling techniques will mean more of that energy can be recovered at lower cost and with less negative environmental fallout than if we drilled it today (think, for example, of the vast amount of natural gas we wasted in the past when it was simply flared off as a waste product). And the longer we can postpone tapping it, the more economic bang per gallon we're likely to get, since the tendency has been for economies to get more and more energy efficient with time (e.g., you can drive an average car much farther on a gallon of gas today than you could with the same gallon in 1960, and you can light a house with LEDs for a lot less energy today than it would have taken you with incandescents just a few years ago).
Also keep in mind that even setting aside the climate-change arguments, there's case to be made that we owe it to future generations not to tap those reserves today. We're going to be leaving them a pretty serious set of problems to address, and a pretty bare cupboard of tools to use. The least we can do is leave them some economically recoverable oil in the ground. The longer we delay tapping those reserves, the more of the work our generation will do of finding complementary energy sources and more efficient ways to use the energy. If you're going to leave future generations with massive debt and a seriously depleted environment, you should at least leave them some key natural resources like oil that haven't yet been exhausted.
You'll notice the Republicans aren't talking much lately about the need to decimate ANWR, drill marine preserves, and build a sludge pipeline across the US. The "drill baby, drill" slogan just isn't getting the same mileage it does when people are feeling the pinch at the pump. But even once prices start to rise again, we should remember the case against tapping our natural reserves prematurely. When we can get more value from those reserves the longer we wait to tap them, the rush just doesn't make sense.
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