Should The Federal Government Relax Regulatory Restrictions To Encourage More Energy Production?
November 7, 2005
Why are oil companies making such big profits?
Because the demand for gasoline and natural gas exceeds the supply.
Why doesn’t supply increase to match demand? In large part because government regulations are getting in the way. The companies that have oil and gas are making too much profit per gallon, while other suppliers are blocked from meeting the public’s needs.
A few examples:
Energy companies are forbidden to drill for the big oil and gas deposits we know lie off the East and West Coasts.
Drilling on America’s vast tracts of public lands is being stymied by activist lawsuits that have nothing to do with public safety or protecting the environment. The Audubon Society, after all, leases drilling rights on its bird sanctuaries.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska includes 18 million acres. Somehow, the refuge’s caribou must have exactly the 2000 acres that would be needed to develop the millions of barrels of oil under the refuge.
Companies can’t get permission to build new refineries, leaving our refining concentrated on the storm-vulnerable Gulf Coast.
Natural gas pipelines aren’t being extended to reach all the would-be customers because of the “not in my backyard” factor.
New England won’t even approve offshore wind farms located out of sight over the horizon. Can wind turbines explode?
The government’s rules are stealing energy from the public. The overregulation is pushing America toward twin evils-inflation and California-style rolling blackouts that next time could be nationwide.
Congress even wants to unleash the trial lawyers for a feeding frenzy at the expense of the energy sector. Years ago, Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency mandated oxidizing agents in gasoline-essentially forcing the use of MTBE-so car and truck engines would burn cleaner. Now, traces of MTBE have been found in the drinking water of some cities.
Fortunately, the leakage is not dangerous to people; it mainly makes the water taste bitter. The lack of danger to people, however, probably wouldn’t stop the trial lawyers from squeezing billions out of MTBE. Erin Brockovich, after all, never proved any human harm from her famous chromium 6.
The private sector is already cleaning up after the EPA’s mistaken MTBE mandate. How much trial-lawyer money should we add on to the current gas-pump prices?
Fortunately, the world is not short of energy. We have uranium and rhodium to produce nuclear energy with no greenhouse gas emissions, in passively-safe power plants.
We still have 200 years worth of fossil energy in the coal seams, tar sands, oil shale and bitumen deposits-all outside the Middle East. With new technologies, they can all be burned cleanly.
Nor will the fossil fuels aggravate the Modern Warming. We’re in another of Nature’s natural, moderate 1500-year climate cycles. We first discovered the natural 1500-year cycle in the 1980s, in ice cores from both Greenland and the Antarctic, but nobody talks about it. “Greenhouse gases” are much more fun.
Real conservationists know that the caribou on Alaska’s North Slope have quadrupled their numbers in the midst of careful oil-drilling. Real conservationists know that nitrogen fertilizer, made with natural gas, has doubled crop yields all over the world, saving millions of square miles of forests from being plowed for low-yield crops.
The Green movement is opposed to all the energy sources. They’re even suing to stop the Medicine Lake geothermal plants in northern California, where energy from the Earth can be tapped directly-without greenhouse gas emissions, without radioactive wastes and without new transmission lines.
Is it time to get realistic energy rules yet? Or must we wait for the rolling blackouts?
Posted in Commentary |