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October 01, 2006
Reagan's Vision And Environmental Luddites
William Perry Pendley, writing over at Townhall.com, highlights on one hand yet another unsung accomplishment of the Reagan administration, and on the other a fine example of the malicious short sightedness of the luddite wing of the environmental movement.
Early last month, Chevron and its partners, including Devon Energy, released news that Chris Isidore of CNN reported “could be the biggest breakthrough in domestic oil supplies since the opening of the Alaska pipeline.” [...] Although Chevron had announced the Jack 2 discovery in September 2004, last month’s test confirmed suspicions as to its potential and caused Chevron to conclude that the Gulf of Mexico’s “lower tertiary region” may hold “3 billion to 15 billion barrels of oil.” U.S. reserves are estimated at less than 30 billion barrels of oil. No wonder the news made headlines!The tract is located on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), an area of 1 billion federally-owned acres that extends from the U.S. coastline, beyond waters owned by coastal states, and was leased by the Minerals Management Service (MMS) in July 1996. The true origins of that lease, however, go back another fifteen years to when Reagan Administration officials abandoned the old system of offering only those tracts thought by government bureaucrats to have energy potential and began “area-wide leasing.” Under the new system, those who would spend hundreds of millions (now billions) of dollars would be able to choose where they took their chances. Moreover, bureaucrats, with nothing to gain and nothing to lose, had a terrible track record of finding oil and gas.
Not surprisingly, environmentalists screamed bloody murder. Nonetheless, the Reagan Administration’s approach to OCS oil and gas leasing was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Environmental groups were not to be denied, however; soon, their congressional allies adopted a moratorium to prevent energy leasing on portions of the OCS. Then, President George H.W. Bush, to validate his claim to being a “kinder and gentler” environmental leader, withdrew a majority of the OCS. President Clinton followed suit.
Today Congress is working on a repeal of the Bush/Clinton ban. Sadly, it is not because Congress recognizes that energy prices are high, that oil supplies are low, or that what we use comes from unstable or unfriendly countries. Instead, Congress fears Cuba’s plans to drill on the OCS and its affect on U.S. resources. Not surprisingly, environmental groups have launched a nationwide campaign to kill the proposal. Plus, Congress, responding to demands from environmental groups, refuses to open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy exploration. Finally, late last week, a federal judge halted leasing of a part of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska thought to contain 2 billion barrels of oil; environmental groups said more migratory bird and calving caribou studies are needed. As another summer ends and winter approaches, the imaginative, innovative, and indefatigable folks of the oil patch, who accomplished what many thought impossible, have shown that Brookes and Simon were right. Meanwhile, Congress and environmental groups are casting their lot with Paul Harvey’s long ago pessimist.
That pessimist, as Pendley reports, said, "“When whale oil is gone the world will be plunged into darkness.” I'm quite sure that a return to whale oil would be quite unacceptable to the environmentalists--sometimes I think that they'd prefer that about 2/3rd of us would just die off. Then the remaining third could return to our proper roles of hunter/gatherers.
More seriously I wonder what, specifically, is the environmental concern with offshore drilling? The Exxon Valdez spill was probably the worst incident in recent memory, but that was a tanker, not a an off shore platform/pipeline system.
Maybe someone can enlighten me to the contrary, but this seems like pure reactionary nay saying. Drilling technology has improved by orders of magnitude since its inception, and with ever expanding technology it will continue to do so. Failure to exploit a find that might equal as much as one half of our current reserves would be almost criminally negligent.
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