On the hierarchy of political metaphors, oil has fallen another notch. Former President George W. Bush institutionalized disrespect for the substance when, in the 2006 State of the Union address, he diagnosed the US as “addicted to oil.” President Barack Obama now has brought his own poetics to the smear campaign. In a Feb. 5 speech at the Department of Energy, he said his economic stimulus proposal, full as it is of spending on nonfossil energy, “will begin to end the tyranny of oil in our time.”
The associations are as invalid as they are deliberately dark. If they guide policy-making, they’re dangerous. And they are driving policy.
Not addicted
Americans are no more addicted to oil than they are to bread or cotton or thermoplastic resins. They don’t use those substances out of dangerous habit. They use them out of economic choice, recognizing benefits net of costs that make the materials superior to competitors.
Nor is oil anything like tyranny. To the contrary, oil liberates people by helping them perform work, move about, and stay comfortable affordably. Tyranny destroys life; oil improves it. So Obama’s characterization of oil was as misguided as his predecessor’s.
In both cases, the presidents sought to highlight oil’s disadvantages and obscure its advantages in order to promote costlier alternatives. In both cases the practice represents cheesy sloganeering that deserves no place in the formulation of energy policy. Moreover, it betrays the dangerously costly presumption that policy should not only promote nonfossil energy forms but also discourage development of oil and gas.
Manifestations of that presumption have appeared with alarming speed in the Obama administration. On Feb. 4, US Sec. of the Interior Ken Salazar ordered the Bureau of Land Management not to accept high bids submitted on 77 tracts in Utah during a lease sale Dec. 18. On Feb. 10, he delayed action on a Bush administration move to accelerate leasing of parts of the Outer Continental Shelf that had been subject to moratoriums for 30 years.
The Interior secretary was wholly unconvincing when he claimed to be imposing deliberation on actions taken in a rush in the closing hours of the Bush years. In fact, the relevant agencies have solicited and received public comments on the leasing moves. There was no “midnight action” to sneak the OCS sale into effect, as Salazar said. There is no absence of information on which to base decisions. Following a familiar pattern, Salazar is stalling to appease environmental extremists intent on blocking leasing as a way to thwart supply and ultimately use of oil and natural gas.
For the US to adopt the extreme antioil agenda—the only agenda truly served by nonsense about addiction and tyranny—would be disastrous. Like the rest of the world, the country will continue to need oil and gas for many years. Policy must accommodate this economic reality.
Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the International Energy Agency, put oil’s role in useful perspective last week at an annual energy conference in Houston by Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Using data from IEA’s World Energy Outlook, Tanaka sketched two scenarios for future reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases. Even under the most aggressive assumptions about emissions cuts, global oil use projected for 2030 exceeds the level of 2007.
Overwhelming benefits
Oil will continue to be used in large amounts because it offers overwhelming benefits of form and cost that policy-makers ignore at great economic peril. Governance based on contrary assumptions will fail. Economies subject to governance of that type will suffer.
The Obama administration should orient policy toward a future in which nonfossil energy forms develop technically, economically, and with government help, along with—as opposed to instead of—oil and gas supply. To do otherwise would impose costs and forgo wealth creation at a moment in history when mistakes like that would be ruinous. If tyranny plays a role in any of this, it takes the form not of oil but of the chance that the government will impose economic pain Americans shouldn’t have to endure.
