Excerpted from “It’s Simple: Drill and Conserve”, by Charles Krauthammer. Aug. 08, 2008
Americans’ greatest concern is the economy, and their greatest economic concern is energy (by a significant margin: 37 percent to 21 percent for inflation). By an overwhelming margin of 2-1, Americans want to lift the moratorium preventing drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf, thus unlocking vast energy resources shut down for the last 27 years.
(Some) say that we cannot drill our way out of the oil crisis. Of course not. But it is equally obvious that we cannot solar or wind or biomass our way out. Does this mean that because any one measure cannot solve a problem, it needs to be rejected?
Why must there be a choice between encouraging conservation and increasing supply? The logical answer is obvious: Do both.
Do everything. Wind and solar. A tire gauge in every mailbox. Hell, a team of oxen for every family (to pull their gasoline-drained SUVs). The consensus in the country, logically unassailable and politically unbeatable, is to do everything possible to both increase supply and reduce demand, because we have a problem that’s been killing our economy and threatening our national security. And no one measure is sufficient.
The “green fuels” … are as yet uneconomical, speculative technologies, still far more expensive than extracted oil and natural gas. We could be decades away. And our economy is teetering. Why would you not drill to provide a steady supply of proven fuels for the next few decades as we make the huge technological and economic transition to renewable energy?
Fine, let’s throw a few tens of billions at such things as electric cars and renewablesis and see what sticks. But (understand that) success will not just require huge amounts of money. It will require equally huge amounts of time and luck.
On the other hand, drilling requires no government program, no newly created bureaucracy, no pie-in-the-sky technologies that no one has yet invented. It requires only one thing, only one act. Lift the moratorium. Private industry will do the rest. And far from draining the treasury, it will replenish it with direct taxes, and with the indirect taxes from the thousands of non-subsidized new jobs created.
(In the energy debate), the argument for “do everything” is not rocket science. It is common sense.
Full commentary:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/08/drill_and_conserve.html
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August 9, 2008 at 2:08 pm |
“Do everything” too often equals to “do nothing”. Resourses are limited. We (as an economy) cant afford to do everything and do it well.
My personal bet is on nuclear. Yeah, that clean, cheap energy that has a terrible image problem. However, take a good look at France – 80% of power capacity of the country is nuclear. They learned the lesson of 1970s energy crunch and now they have a luxury of looking from the sidelines as Germany, Britan, etc are begging Gazprom to play nice.
A politician with some intelectual integraty would cut US Gov red tape and let Westinghouse, Areva, GE and hitachi solve US energy problem. And then a gallon of gas equivalent of nuclear helectricity only cost $0.40…..