Advocates of constructive energy policy in the US-including President George W. Bush-must focus on something other than oil imports. They follow anxiety over rising US import dependency into a rhetorical trap, the dangers of which become evident in a study published Feb. 15 by the World Resources Institute (WRI), Washington, DC.
Entitled "Facing the US Oil Supply Problem: Would Opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Really Make a Difference?" the study notes a 1998 estimate by the US Geological Survey that ANWR offers reasonable hope for the discovery of 10.3 billion bbl of recoverable oil. WRI assesses the potential only in the context of import dependency.
Energy security
"We cannot rely on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to significantly alleviate our long-term security problems stemming from heavy reliance on increasingly imported oil," declares James Mackenzie, the study's author. Nancy Kete, director of WRI's Climate, Energy, and Pollution Program, develops the theme. "Opening up the Arctic to the pollution and disruption of oil production," she says, "cannot succeed as an energy security strategy."
They have an agenda, of course, articulated by Kete: "We must face the inescapable fact that the nation's environment, economy, national security, and oil resource base all point to the need for vast investments in energy efficiency and the rapid introduction of new, nonoil energy sources."
The WRI officials don't say so, but their program requires the heavy taxation of hydrocarbon energy and equally heavy subsidization of "nonoil energy sources" that can't now compete. They don't say so because they wouldn't want to call attention to the wealth transfers and sacrifices inherent in their proposals.
What should most concern the oil and gas industry, however, is the facile way WRI kicks aside the potential for discovery of 10.3 billion bbl of oil. The volume represents nearly half of current US oil reserves. It's more than Norway's total oil reserves, more than Brazil's, and twice the UK's.
Discovery of 10.3 billion bbl of oil on the ANWR Coastal Plain would rejuvenate the Alaskan economy and move the needles on national economic gauges. It would create jobs and tax revenues. It would boost US oil production.
But because US import dependency probably would increase anyway, WRI dismisses all this economic goodness as not worth the environmental disturbance. Then it parlays the logic into a case for oil substitutes.
The argument is preposterous. And import bogey-mongering hands it to them on antique platter.
The central problem of energy policy in the US is not import dependency, which is inescapable, but a fierce political bias against work essential to energy supply. ANWR isn't the only example.
Florida, for example, is determined to block federal oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico off its shores, says Gov. Jeb Bush. Floridians, however much they like tourism, boating, vehicle travel, and air conditioning, think oil and gas drilling is-in the words of a Jan. 23 Tampa Tribune editorial-"dirty business."
In accordance with similar lines of reasoning, growing areas of federal land in the US West are specifically or effectively off-limits to drilling and production. Siting of power generation facilities is difficult in some areas. And despite a growing deficiency of refining capacity, refineries are closing because of environmental standards stricter than they need to be.
Taken one at a time, decisions that err on the side of environmental precaution can seem prudent. In aggregate, however, they form a pattern of institutional resistance to the development of energy supply. For leading the nation in this type of energy obstructionism, California now pays a heavy price.
The bias
The bias is real, the problem serious-more serious than import dependency.
Because of the bias, most politicians will accept without question the assertion by WRI that oil production on the ANWR Coastal Plain would pollute the entire Arctic. And because energy supply yields politically to whatever environmental activist groups say, Alaskan Gov. Tony Knowles, who supports ANWR leasing, recently conceded that the measure lacks the support it needs in Congress.
Oh, well. It's only the potential for discovery of 10.3 billion bbl of oil. For anyone anxious about the wrong things, that seems hardly worth the bother.
