Brains are in Short Supply

Walt Disney World is roughly fifteen times the size of the proposed drilling area inside ANWR. Think about that. Not one. Not two. Fifteen.

Another way to look at it: the drilling area is about twice the size of Central Park.

Liberals tell us the impact would be larger, because there would be roads and pipelines. Hmm…we already have a huge pipeline in Alaska, and it hasn’t caused any problems. And exactly how much road do you need to service a tiny patch of oil rigs? Not much. Here in Florida, we have something like six lanes of limited-access highway between Miami and Orlando, in each direction. Their impact on the environment is minimal. Would anyone seriously propose that ANWR would require more pavement than the main connections between two major US cities? Well, yes. An ignorant hippie would.

How can this still be controversial? The public supports ANWR drilling by a margin of nearly two to one. No President I can recall has won by a margin like that. Not even Reagan, who crushed Jimmy Carter like a peanut shell.

Far-left nuts also oppose offshore drilling, which has been perfected and has no negative environmental impact whatsoever. What’s that all about? Fish love oil rigs; they love any type of offshore structure. Here in South Florida, the greenies in the government deliberately sink old ships on our reefs, to increase fish populations. They’re fantastic for commercial and recreational fishermen, who contribute to the economy. Offshore rigs don’t have oil spills; they didn’t spill oil when Katrina hit them. We have technology to contain the chemicals released during exploration and drilling. Someone explain the problem to me.

The sad thing is, we’re going to have offshore drilling near our coasts. The Chinese are getting ready to do it. I would guess that the average American is too ignorant to know that we can’t regulate activity over twenty-four miles from shore. If the Chinese want to build an oil rig every fifty feet, from Key West to Maine, there will be nothing we can do to stop them. Shouldn’t oil close to our shores be our oil? We send China our money, but at least we get products in return. Should we give them our oil, too, for nothing? That oil is free for the taking. Whoever drills first will get it. And then, if we’re lucky, they’ll sell it to us.

Frankly, I support Chinese and Indian drilling off our coasts. I hope they drill the bejeezus out of those reserves. God bless them. We’re too stupid to drill; thank God not everyone has that attitude. Why do I say that? Because any increase in the world’s oil supply will depress costs on the worldwide market. It would obviously be better if we drilled the oil, but even if China gets it, it will reduce gas prices here.

Here’s an interesting fact I just learned. The “break even” price for a barrel of oil, which would make extraction from our gigantic, Saudi-dwarfing shale reserves profitable, is probably somewhere around $40 per barrel. And the reason we’re not extracting the oil is that investors are scared that the price will collapse. In other words, they invest while oil costs $140 per barrel, and then the price plunges to a point below the break-even level, and they have to close up shop. Is that likely? Are we ever going to see sub-$40 oil again? I tend to doubt it. Seems to me that if we’re going to try kooky liberal taxes and subsidies, the only intelligent ploy is to guarantee a profit to oil shale investors.

Look at the logic. As it stands now, these people have to invest a lot of capital, and they risk losing all of it. The up side is a potential bonanza, with profits beyond their fondest hopes. Do we have to guarantee an astronomical profit in order to get people to invest? No. An intelligent investor would be thrilled to get a guarantee of 20% per year, which we can easily afford. Wouldn’t you put your money in a project that guaranteed a 20% return? I sure would. I’d sink every loose dime into it and consider myself retired. In fact, I’d be thrilled with 10%.

We have recoverable reserves in the TRILLIONS of barrels. Most of the world’s reserves are in this country. Think about that. We have something like six times the reserves of Saudi Arabia. Remember now, that doesn’t include our conventional reserves, which are also huge.

Guaranteeing shale investment sure beats production-killing taxes and money-sink subsidies on oil produced by existing technology.

Now that I think about it, why do we persist in pretending we’re running out of oil, if we have enormous reserves which we are positive we can eventually extract profitably? There’s a good question for the Presidential debates.

Think how wonderful it would be. Cheap gas to keep us going until we do the responsible thing and build more nuclear reactors. To keep us afloat while we develop new energy sources that actually work. It would allow us to make a smooth transition to something like hydrogen fuel cells.

Still, the hippies have convinced many people that the answer is to slow down, do less, and kill the economy. I wish we had their PR resources and they had our standards of personal hygiene.

The great promise of the Internet is that because of it, truth can no longer be suppressed. Information can’t be controlled the way it used to be, and we should be reaping policy dividends from that change. Yet somehow we still believe in farcical concepts like global warming, ethanol, drilling bans, and the restriction of clean, safe, cheap, abundant nuclear power.

Before the Internet broke the MSM’s stranglehold on the information pipeline, we could be excused for making stupid decisions. But now we deserve whatever happens to us.