The US government is veering off course on energy policy and economic stimulus. Its persistent hostility toward development of natural resources severely limits the potential of both initiatives.
Energy policy can do little for national interests if it doesn't encourage exploration and development of hydrocarbon resources. And a government reluctant to allow productive use of land closes off a basic factor of economic growth.
There is one twinkle of hope in the exertions over energy and economic policy that Congress probably won't finish before 2001 ends. It is House approval last August of a bill that includes oil and gas leasing of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain. The move upheld a bold initiative of President George W. Bush and surprised everyone.
Senate alternative
That twinkle darkens in the Senate. Democrats in charge there, eternally beholden to environmental pressure groups, have proposed energy legislation that excludes ANWR leasing, shackles policy to international panic over climate change, and mandates renewable blendstocks in gasoline.
The nation's two main political parties might well hold ANWR comfortably aside and still have plenty to argue over before next year's elections. Yet without ANWR, the argument would be over little more than taxation ideology and liberal fantasies about petroleum substitutes. If the debate yields no more access to the hydrocarbon re- source than exists now, the greatest possible energy benefit will be preservation of output from marginal wells. There's nothing wrong with that. But it falls far short of what the US could achieve with a more constructive approach toward energy, resource development, and how they relate to economic health.
What about jobs? What about incomes? What about tax revenues?
Land on which nothing can happen except hiking and gawking produces no jobs, no in- comes, no tax revenues. And ANWR's bleak coastal plain-the only part of ANWR that can be leased-attracts few hikers and gawkers.
With one interesting exception, the essential link between energy and economic policy has received little more than unconscious lip service. The exception is Teamsters Union support of ANWR leasing. The union recognizes that hundreds of thousands of jobs might result from ANWR exploration and production. Its support was crucial to passage of the House energy bill.
The oil and gas industry should capitalize on this insight from organized labor. Its access to the US oil and gas resource has shrunk in recent decades in submission to an environmentalist creed proclaiming that the more acreage a government can exclude from economic activity, the better. In return for this forgone work, income, and tax revenue, the nation now possesses a vast and growing tinder box-forests so thickly undergrown for lack of surface activity that lightning strikes regularly create infernos.
And that's just onshore. Offshore, the US essentially precludes oil and gas work except in the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico and off parts of Alaska. And nobody's doing anything about it.
The Minerals Management Service proposes no change to this pattern in its plan for Outer Continental Shelf leasing in 2002-07. It proposes no leasing of areas either subject to budgeting moratoriums imposed by Congress or withdrawn by executive order. And it doesn't expand the 256-block smudge on the offshore map left available for leasing after surgery by unbelievably squeamish Floridian politicians-whose state also happens desperately to need natural gas. National Ocean Industries Association calls the draft 5-year plan "one of the smallest, most limited ever issued" and the limited Florida offering "untenable given the economic and security issues facing the nation today and in the future."
Untouchability
The US needs a change of official attitude about federal land and natural resources. Neither wealth nor energy can be created out of thin air. In some form, land is an essential ingredient of each. With modern technology and practice, economic use of land can occur with little disruption to natural values other than the environmentalist ideal of untouchability.
So how large an inventory of untouchable acreage can the US afford to maintain? Increased attention to that question would represent a welcome sign of government seriousness about national energy and economic interests.
