Pete Ashdown, owner of Xmission Internet Services in Salt Lake City, former senatorial candidate, and all-around good guy, penned a piece in response to recent efforts to expand oil extraction in the US. Here’s an excerpt:
Carter proposed that U.S. automakers attain a whopping 48-mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency by 1995. He demanded that we curtail imported oil by imposing fees. Finally, Carter proposed windfall taxes on oil companies to fund alternative energy and a goal of generating 20 percent of our power from solar by 2000. What happened? It would be nice to see an explanation from Hatch, since he was a three-year senator in 1979. His explanation not forthcoming, my presumption is Carter’s visionary energy goals were tossed on the trash heap, along with the solar panels he’d installed on the White House, when Ronald Reagan moved in. America then increased dependency on foreign oil and forfeited automobile innovation to Japan. Middle East oil-rich dictatorships went on to become even wealthier and more entrenched… A small patch of Alaskan wilderness, coastal drilling, oil-shale magic, nuclear power subsidies, less regulation on fabulously wealthy companies – these will make us energy independent and gasoline inexpensive again? … This country retooled its entire industrial sector nearly overnight in order to fight World War II. America fulfilled President Kennedy’s challenge to land on the moon in under a decade. Yet become energy independent with renewable technology in the same amount of time? Sorry, we’ll leave that kind of innovation to advanced countries like Brazil, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden. Solving our energy problems by loosing the reins on the oil, gas and coal companies is a deal that requires us to forget 30 years of history. This bargain ignores the hidden health costs of polluted air and water and insists that consumption of energy is not correlated to the price. In spite of their feel-good commercials, these companies are not here to solve our energy and pollution problems. They’re here to make a profit.
Unlike Ashdown, I believe nuclear power to be a viable, effective, clean method of power production with minimal environmental side-effects. I think we need to be spending more money developing nuclear power.
But like Ashdown, I believe allowing oil companies free reign on protected reserves is not a long-term solution. Demand for oil is outstripping supply. We live in the age of Peak Oil, and we must create new technologies based upon renewable — or at least extremely-abundant — resources to power our needs for the twenty-second century and beyond.
Additional US oil exploration is a Band-Aid on the severed artery of oil independence.