“It's time for America to get serious about energy independence,
And that means we need to start drilling offshore, at advanced oil rigs like this.”
Presidential Candidate John McCain
As Candidate John McCain now chants his new American Oil Mantra, ‘Drill, Baby, Drill,’ numerous critics across the U.S. still point out, as we have for many years, that there is far too little untapped oil in our American waters to make any significant difference in both our current, and more importantly, in our future gasoline prices, especially considering the vast and ever growing global demand for the world’s remaining, and now rapidly diminishing, oil reserves.
‘Drilling Now’ and ‘Drilling More’ as John McCain now likes to proclaim (after being adamantly against more drilling for the last 25 years in the Senate), won't yield any beneficial results for many years to come, and more and more offshore drilling, despite what he and many other politicians are saying today, won’t end our enslavement to foreign oil.
The reality is that whether we drill more or we drill less, it really won't make much of a difference — not against the sheer scale of the enormous energy and climate crisis facing America today – and not against our current, unchanging, and extremely out-dated, national energy policies, which don’t bode very well for America’s future.
The International Energy Agency recently estimated that under the world’s current ‘business-as-usual’ oil based economy scenario — which so many politicians still seem so adamant on perpetuating in America today — global oil demand will rise at least 70% by the year 2050. And this increased demand will represent at least five times more oil than the extremely oil-rich nation of Saudi Arabia now produces, annually.
We can drill every inch of America’s coastlines with new ‘advanced’ oil rigs, as Senator McCain and many other politicians now favor, but it will still not make much of a dent in our immense foreign oil dependency; and we will still never be able to compete globally with oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia.
Even if we started more offshore drilling tomorrow; and even if we now opened up every square inch of our outer continental shelf to offshore drilling; and even if we drilled the entire state of Alaska; and even if we somehow miraculously pulled brand new American oil refineries out of thin air, the truth of the matter is that the impact on our gasoline prices will be extremely minimal; and even worse, this minimal impact will be extremely delayed, by many years.
Our own Interior Department estimates that we have about 18 billion barrels of recoverable oil remaining on our continental shelf. Sounds like a lot, right?
In reality, it’s not a lot, at all. We currently consume about 6.6 billion barrels of oil annually in the U.S.; and this figure has been rising, and it will continue to rise under our oil based economy. This means that if we’re extremely lucky, more offshore drilling may result in about 3 years’ worth of oil. The math is not that difficult.
And a 2004 study by the Energy Information Administration determined that drilling in ANWR for example, might trim the price of our gasoline at the pump by perhaps 3 and a half cents a gallon - by around the year 2027 – almost 20 years from now. Even the American Petroleum Institute says that more offshore drilling today won’t result in any impact at all on our gasoline prices for at least a decade.
But John McCain now disagrees with these oil experts; and he now says that he prefers to believe oil industry executives who’ve told him that it won’t take that long. Who do you think we should believe?
And believe it or not, John McCain’s Presidential platform, written in part by a former lobbyist for the oil industry, pushes for accelerated oil drilling and coal mining, but it horrendously marginalizes the importance of renewable energy such as wind, solar, and geo-thermal.
It doesn’t sound like Mr. McCain’s new ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ philosophy will do much good - for our nation - or for any of us now suffering from today’s abysmal energy prices. And it’s already far too late for the U.S. to even attempt to play ‘catch-up’ with the Middle Eastern oil giants.
And even worse today, and very sadly, we’re already now abysmally falling far behind in alternative energy solutions and milestones already being set, and already being accomplished, by many other nations around the globe.
Denmark has been leading the way in alternative energy production ever since the OPEC Oil Embargo in 1973. Today, Danish companies manufacture 40 percent of the world's supply of wind turbines, as well as having had extensive research programs in alternative energy for decades now. And this alternative energy technology also provides employment for a large segment of Denmark’s population today.
In Japan, their major automakers are already in ‘production mode’ with all-electric cars, with Nissan, Subaru, and Mitsubishi all readying their introductions of their first ‘all- electric’ automobile model lines in 2010 – only two years from now. And stocks in each of these three Japanese auto companies are now soaring, along with those of Japanese battery manufacturers, which already have very lucrative relationships with these extremely forward looking Japanese auto giants.
Unlike our American automakers, who are now laying off thousands of American employees, complaining that no one wants to buy their gas guzzlers, and now already eagerly in line for a $25 billion government bailout like the one we’re now handing to Wall Street for their incompetence, greed, and lack of initiative and foresight.
In Ireland, the Irish government has already approved plans for the world's largest offshore electricity-generating wind farm, to be built on a sandbank in the Irish Sea south of Dublin.
Both Germany and Spain are already light years ahead of America in developing and using much more cost efficient solar energy applications.
And France has been researching and developing wave and tidal energy, for almost 30 years now.
The alternative energy list of extremely wise, ‘future-looking’ nations around the globe goes on and on; and very horrendously, America has yet to even make a mark on this list.
Yet, the current Presidential campaign in America today very sadly ignores all of this; and it’s been horrendously taken over by meaningless political slogans and media sounds bites like ‘Drill, Baby, Drill;’ and by yet another truly meaningless debate over more offshore drilling vs. less offshore drilling, which is once again obscuring a far more relevant question regarding America’s energy crisis today:
How can America finally develop workable alternative fuels — right here and right now? And how can we hope to remain a powerful nation, or even a world leader of the future, as we very miserably fall further and further behind almost everyone else on the planet in alternative energy solutions?
It’s a topic that everyone in this country should have been seriously thinking about, and seriously debating, and seriously discussing, for at least the last 25-30 years. And it’s an area that our leaders should have been steering us towards – for the last 25-30 years – and not still dragging us down the same abysmal, and extremely costly path, to more and more oil.
Instead of squabbling over nickels and dimes that we might possibly obtain from three years’ worth of offshore oil drilling in the distant future, we should be thinking about, and discussing, and helping to create, a sound, new, national energy plan to finally capture and utilize the only real future we have in energy: wind, solar, electric, and bio-fuel.
And today, this should truly be one of America's top priorities - with our leadership, with our citizens, and even with those in this country who still don't believe a single word that Al Gore and many others have been saying for years about the dire consequences of global warming vs. our continued and never ending usage and pursuit of fossil fuels.
If we are to have any chance at all of avoiding an extremely abysmal American future in which we one day look back very nostalgically at these horrendous $4-a-gallon gasoline prices, and we continue to wonder why we let nations that have far more oil than we do (nations like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia), dictate our foreign policy to us - we need new, scaled-up, non-fossil fuel, renewable, energy alternatives – right now.
And even worse, we have been pouring billions and billions of dollars into oil-rich Iraq for several years now, to stabilize their government and to secure their oil reserves. And today, even Iraq is now signing oil deals with China – one of our greatest oil rivals on this planet.
Today’s drilling advocates argue that we need to start drilling more right now, so that we'll be able to reap these nickel and dime benefits of more offshore drilling in about a decade or two. But many of us in America today still continue to believe that this will be a complete waste of our time – precious time that we should, instead, be utilizing to pursue the development of much better, much more cost efficient, truly renewable, American energy sources — and we have no time left to waste.
Eight times this year alone, the U.S. Senate has failed to pass legislation that would extend tax credits to encourage the further development of American wind and solar energy - legislation that will expire at the end of this year.
And Presidential Candidate John McCain, it must be noted, somehow missed all eight of these extremely critical votes in the Senate. He doesn’t seem to care much about alternative energy, but his Presidential platform does include an additional $3.8 billion in tax subsidies for the oil industry. These are both matters of public record — a record that just doesn't seem to mesh very well with his new campaign promises and political rhetoric that he will pursue an aggressive national alternative energy program, along with his new offshore drilling mantra.
And with the end of these direly needed alternative energy tax credits, America’s renewable energy industry is already grinding to a halt, not forging ahead as it definitely should be, according to many people, including Peter Duprey, CEO of the North American arm of the Spanish renewable company Acciona Energy, which has a 64-megawatt solar thermal plant operating outside Las Vegas, and which recently launched a 180-megawatt wind farm on the border between North Dakota and South Dakota.
"Everyone says America is the land of opportunity for renewables," says Duprey. "But we have to get serious about it. And we have to get serious about it – right now.”
Mr. Duprey points out that both the arguments and the money used by today’s proponents of more offshore drilling would be much better utilized to support a much more aggressive American investment in alternatives.
"We have these vast untapped renewable energy reserves," he says, referring to the rich wind resources of our Midwest, and to the vast solar potential of our Southwest. "We just need to build the transmission lines to move that energy out."
And according to Joshua Magee, a research director for wind energy at Emerging Energy Research, "This is a critical time for extending the production tax credit for wind. If we move into 2009, and it hasn't been extended, new orders will shrink, and it will be a major blow to these new U.S. wind manufacturing, investment, and employment opportunities, across many states."
This is the real challenge, and the real task, facing our government leaders today. And this is the real political debate that should be going on between our Presidential candidates today - whether it means building these alternative energy lines directly, or using more tax credits to support the alternative energy industry - in finally weaning ourselves, and our now severely energy crippled nation, off of more and more oil.
And this is truly the discussion that we should all be having this election season — not another truly empty argument over more offshore drilling vs. properly inflating our gas-guzzling automobile tires.
But once again, most American citizens today simply don’t seem to care very much about this extremely important issue, or about our current political process, and where it so horrendously continues to lead us today. And we don’t even seem to care very much about our children’s future.
We now seem extremely content to live out our lives listening to, and readily believing in, extremely useless and worn out political rhetoric like ‘Drill, Baby, Drill,’ never even bothering to do any energy research on our own, and never bothering to ask any truly meaningful questions of our current and potential national leaders, concerning America’s energy future.
And I, for one, think that’s a damned shame – for all of us, and for future generations of Americans to come.
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