The carbon phobia bias

Robert Samuelson:

Considering the brutal recession, you'd expect the Obama administration to be obsessed with creating jobs. And so it is, say the president and his supporters. The trouble is that there's one glaring exception to their claims: the oil and natural gas industries. The administration is biased against them -- a bias that makes no sense on either economic or energy grounds. Almost everyone loves to hate the world's Exxons, but promoting domestic drilling is simply common sense.

Contrary to popular wisdom, the United States still has huge oil and natural gas resources. The outer continental shelf (OCS), including parts that have been off-limits to drilling since the early 1980s, may contain much natural gas and 86 billion barrels of oil, about four times today's "proven" U.S. reserves. The U.S. Geological Survey recently estimated that the Bakken Formation in North Dakota and Montana may hold 3.65 billion barrels, more than 20 times a 1995 estimate. And there's upward of 2 trillion barrels of oil shale, concentrated in Colorado. If only 800 billion barrels were recoverable, that's triple Saudi Arabia's proven reserves.

None of these sources, of course, will quickly provide oil or natural gas. Projects can take 10 to 15 years. The OCS estimates are just that. Oil and gas must still be located -- a costly and chancy process. Extracting oil from shale (in effect, a rock) requires heating the shale and poses major environmental problems. Its economic viability remains uncertain. But any added oil could ultimately diminish dependence on imports, now almost 60 percent of U.S. consumption, while exploration and development would immediately boost high-wage jobs (geologists, petroleum engineers, roustabouts).

Though straightforward, this logic mostly eludes the Obama administration, which is fixated on "green jobs" and wind and solar energy. Championing "clean" fuels has become a political set piece. On Earth Day (April 22), the president visited an Iowa factory that builds towers for wind turbines. "We can remain the world's leading importer of oil, or we can become the world's leading exporter of clean energy," he said.

...

For now, reducing oil imports requires using less or producing more. Obama has attended to the first with higher fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles. But his administration is undermining the second. At the Department of Interior, which oversees public lands and the OCS, Secretary Ken Salazar has taken steps that dampen development: cancelled 77 leases in Utah, because they were too close to national parks; extended a comment period for OCS exploration to evaluate possible environmental effects; and signaled more caution toward shale for similar reasons.

...

... In 2007, wind and solar generated less than 1 percent of U.S. electricity. Even a tenfold expansion will leave their contribution small. By contrast, oil and natural gas now provide two-thirds of Americans' energy. They will dominate consumption for decades. Any added oil produced here will mostly reduce imports; extra natural gas will mostly displace coal in electricity generation. Neither threatens any anti-global warming program that Congress might adopt.

...

It is not that they are a direct threat to the environment, but the greenies see them as a threat to their manipulation of the price of energy. They want to keep the cost high in order to make their favored forms of energy more viable. The carbon phobes think they can force us to use less efficient alternatives by strangling domestic production. It has been their policy for about 30 years. They think they can now implement it and ignore the promises they made to get elected last November when Republicans were pushing them on freeing up domestic production. For some reason the Republicans have lost focus on this issue, but it is a winner for them if they push it.