What he was suppose to do is exactly what I said he was suppose to do. Build peak-use generators. Which is what he eventually did. What he initially did was institute an energy savings program (that failed), which he ended up apologizing for. By not drilling in the face of increased demand we are seeing his policy repeated on a national scale.
In your opinion. His initial disapproval ratings started with the energy crisis. He stumbled right out of the gate (and yes, I admit that he inherited the mess).
Which part isn’t your problem? If you don’t live in the US, then certainly higher prices here aren’t your problem (in fact, it may be helping you out, depending on where you live, because of lower demand in the US). If you are saying higher overall world wide demand isn’t your problem, well, that would only be the case if you don’t drive a vehicle that uses FF as an energy source.
Well first one would need to demonstrate to me what is the overall objective and convince me that is necessary. Saying simply we need lower gas prices is not a good argument in my book. Once that premise has been laid out then I need to be convinced that ANWR meets that objective in the most effective means of metting those objectives.
The argument that we should drill for oil there because we can and it doesn’t hurt the environment seem to me to be missing some underlying basis for the need to do so.
Well, I’ll play devil’s advocate here and take a shot:
I can see several viable objectives. One would be to inject more oil into the world oil system. Another would be more jobs to American workers. Another would be more tax revenue. Another would be more capital injected into the US system. Building the infrastructure and drilling system now to anticipate future world wide demand and to give some slack to the system both in the short and medium term are valid objectives.
As for necessary, well…what is necessary? All of those things are reasonable objectives though, but none of them are necessary in the sense that we won’t fall apart if we don’t do them. Our future national security doesn’t ride on us developing those resources after all. But I don’t think something needs to be necessary in order for us to do it.
If it were the only argument then you may have a point. Especially since this development is unlikely to radically lower the price of gas at the pump. However, that’s not the only argument that has been put forward.
There are an estimated 16 billion barrels of oil in this region (and LOTS of natural gas…sorry, don’t remember how much off the top of my head). So, I’d say that the region can certainly meet the objectives I listed above…and it’s probably the single largest reserve we still have left at this point. Certainly it warrants exploration to see just what is out there so that we can base our future policies on factual estimates of what’s actually there. Same with offshore oil reserves.
Well, it does…I agree. We shouldn’t just drill there because we can do so relatively safely. We should do so for valid economic and political reasons. Valid economic reasons would entail the fact that 16 billion barrels of oil are going to be worth a LOT of capital at market…and it’s going to be capital over a fairly long period of time (IOW, it’s going to generate a steady stream of wealthy instead of a one shot deal). Valid political reasons include jobs and injections of capital into the state and local levels due to development (those folks got to eat…they will be spending their money on entertainment and such). Additionally there are all those nice taxes, again both state and federal…that’s a LOT of money injected into our political system that currently isn’t being injected (billions of dollars in taxes). Other reasons for drilling is to relieve some of the pressure on the current production infrastructure world wide, give more slack to the system and perhaps ease some of the fears driving speculation up.
Do the downsides of drilling at this time (well, in say a couple of years if we start development and full exploration sometime soon) outweigh the positives? THAT is a debate, no doubt. Should we hold onto this reserve for now and trot it out when it’s REALLY needed? There is some merit there of course…the problem is that if we REALLY need it in a couple of years it will still be a couple of years before we get it if we don’t start exploration and development now.