With higher gasoline prices a continuing political concern, it’s
high time somebody placed the blame where it belongs — and high
time that somebody recognizes that while there are few short-term
solutions that can immediately alleviate the cash crunch, it’s
worth realizing that today’s long-term solutions will one day make
a difference in some future year’s short-term. In other words, even
long-term plans do, at some point, bear results that at some point
seem immediate.
Today’s problems would be better at the not-inconsequential
margins, for example, if drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife
Refuge had been approved 25 years ago when that state’s Sen. Ted
Stevens first brought it up.
Congress and various bureaucracies have messed up this nation’s
energy policies for decades — and it is the liberals, which means
almost all Democrats, who have been responsible for the mess. One
big problem, for instance, is not with the oil supply but with
refining capacity. No new refineries have been built in three
decades. Why? Because they aren’t profitable. Why? Because
environmental regs have skewed the market too much, at least until
last year’s Energy Bill (a mix of good policies and horrible ones)
provided new incentives for refineries that soon should catalyze
investment in new plants.
Meanwhile, home heating and cooling prices are much higher, and
the environment itself much worse off, because the eco-lobby so
successfully poisoned the atmospherics of the debate about nuclear
power plants. But nuclear energy emits no greenhouse gases, so
environmentalists who opposed the nukes are also responsible for
the burning of fossil fuels that poison the air they so claim to
want to clean up.
And so on and so forth, with domestic production of usable
energy of many sorts being hobbled by public policy-makers who
haven’t seemed to give a hoot about the growing problems associated
with American dependence on foreign energy sources.
TODAY, LET’S FOCUS ON THE KEY problem of a lack of domestic
production of oil and gas. National public policy in this regard
has been horrendously negligent — and the Alaskan refuge drilling
ban is only a small part of the problem.
The bigger problem is the overall moratorium on all
drilling off U.S. coasts except those in the central and western
Gulf of Mexico. Vast supplies of oil and natural gas lie off of
Alaska, California, Florida, Virginia, and (I’m told) probably New
Jersey and the Carolinas as well. But they lie untapped, forbidden
from use by the utterly counterproductive agitation by
environmentalists and tourism boosters with overly heightened
sensitivities but too little sense (and too little knowledge).
For instance, if it is oil spills or leakage that they worry
about, their high-energy-using states risk far less ecological
damage if they drill offshore wells and use pipelines than if they
bring in the oil on foreign tankers. Tankers are much, much more
dangerous, as we all were reminded when the Exxon Valdez
fouled a key part of Alaska’s coastline.
From 1990 to 1999, the average annual spillage or seepage from
pipelines and oil platforms in North America was 2.06 thousand
tons. From tankers, spills alone amounted to 5.3 thousand tons,
while “operational discharges” added another 220 tons of fuel into
our waters.
These numbers, by the way, come from the National Academy of
Sciences, not from some energy lobby.
Meanwhile, Floridians especially are worried that their
tourists’ sightlines will somehow be affected by oil rigs. But most
drilling is done way offshore, far from any beachgoer’s view. Why
ban drilling 150 miles offshore, while risking a major spill from
tankers that frequent the state’s ports?
Even worse, Florida’s misplaced squeamishness has gone to such
lengths that its powerful congressional delegation has long refused
to allow any other states to opt out of the moratorium,
for fear of some nonexistent slippery slope that might, years
hence, lead to oil derricks within sight of Sanibel Island or Miami
Beach, or something like that. But why should a ban on drilling
designed to protect Florida keep Virginians from choosing to profit
from natural gas produced in federal waters off Virginia
shores?
For the cause of American energy independence, which is
necessary both for lower prices and for national security reasons,
the moratorium on offshore drilling should be narrowed so as to
apply only within, say, 50 or 75 miles of anybody’s coastline, and
it should allow each state to choose for itself whether to lend its
infrastructure to drilling in its adjacent federal waters.
Not only should the moratorium be lifted, but states should
actually be given incentives to let drilling commence and/or
continue and expand.
That’s where various pieces of pending legislation come in.
Senators John Warner (R-Va.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) have a bill
that would let states opt out of the moratorium, plus let states
get a greater share of the royalties from the drilling. Senators
Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) want to allow
drilling in a large part of the so-called “Lease Area 181,” which
is off the Florida and Alabama coasts. And Sen. Mary Landrieu of
Louisiana (D), along with the entire Louisiana delegation (and,
except for the Floridians, supported strongly by other Gulf Coast
senators, especially Alabama’s Jeff Sessions), are pushing various
versions of bills that would go a long way to making safe drilling
worth the while of states — and thus give greater incentives for
states to opt out of the moratorium and for states already out of
the moratorium to be more aggressive about attracting energy
businesses.
THERE’S A SERIOUS ELEMENT of fairness involved with the proposals
from Landrieu et al. Under current law, the federal government
shares 50 percent of all royalties from onshore exploration on
federal lands with the states within whose boundaries the lands
lie. But for drilling in federal waters, the feds share not a penny
of the royalties with the states off whose shores the drilling is
performed — even though those states bear the brunt, in terms of
infrastructure and environmental risks (little though they are), of
the drilling. In most states the eco-risks are tiny; in Louisiana,
however, which has coastal wetlands covering the entire southern
third of the state, the pipelines (and canals through which they
are laid) have played a big role in the coastal erosion that so
plagues the Bayou State and that now leaves it so much more
unprotected from hurricane surges. (Coastal wetlands can act as a
sponge that absorbs hurricane surges; the less marshland, the worse
the damage to the remaining “dry” land from each storm.)
Sen. Landrieu’s legislation would provide for the same 50/50
revenue sharing for coastal states that the inland states
receive.
As well it should. There is no good reason for onshore states to
reap a bonanza while Gulf states get no benefit whatsoever from
drilling. Moreover, with Gulf states trying to recover from Katrina
and other hurricanes, any revenues shared with them could be used
for wetland restoration, levee rebuilding, and other projects that
will help them recover from the recent storms and protect
themselves better from the next ones.
The Landrieu proposals are no mere liberal giveaways, by the
way. They are strongly supported by Alabama’s conservative Sen.
Jeff Sessions, and no less than former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
(who has no real dog in the fight) has come out strongly in favor
of sharing the offshore revenues — especially for Louisiana, of
which he recently wrote that it is particularly true that
production off its shores “puts an infinitely greater burden on it
than energy produced from other federal territory puts on any other
state.”
And as it was put by Sen. Landrieu — sounding for all the world
like a free-market, energy-bullish conservative — “The nation has
a need for more oil and gas, and we are the nation’s only Energy
Coast. We’ve got to increase our supply, not decrease it; and we
also have to conserve more. But the host states along the Gulf
Coast are the ones who make offshore energy possible. So
particularly after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we need to use our
fair share of these royalties to build better, stronger levees and
to restore our eroding wetlands — the first line of defense
against oncoming storms. This is literally a life-or-death
situation for the people of my state, and it is imperative that
this new source of revenue come to help us in the long term
rebuilding efforts of the Gulf Coast.”
For reasons of compassion, sovereignty, national security, and
economics, more drilling is a vital necessity. For Congress to fail
to act, especially in the light of gasoline at more than $3 per
gallon and rising, would be unconscionable.
