Sarah Palin Was Right #20: George Will on Domestic Energy Reserves

In her 2008 debate with Joe Biden, Sarah Palin argued:

"When we talk about energy, we have to consider the need to do all that we can to allow this nation to become energy independent. It’s a nonsensical position that we are in when we have domestic supplies of energy all over this great land."

Just the month before, Gov. Palin had said in her RNC acceptance speech:

"The stakes for our nation could not be higher... we cannot leave ourselves at the mercy of foreign suppliers... And take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: We’ve got lots of both."

She wasn't just bragging on Alaska's natural resources, her experience as governor of an energy-producing state, or the energy expertise she acquired as an oil and gas commissioner. The United States is rich in oil and natural gas reserves; rich beyond our wildest dreams. In his most recent Townhall.com column, George Will says claims that we are running out of oil have repeatedly been made for the past ninety-five years:

"In 1914, the Bureau of Mines said U.S. oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, the Interior Department said the world had 13 years worth of petroleum reserves. Then a global war was fought and the postwar boom was fueled, and in 1951 Interior reported that the world had ... 13 years of reserves. In 1970, the world's proven oil reserves were an estimated 612 billion barrels. By 2006, more than 767 billion barrels had been pumped and proven reserves were 1.2 trillion barrels. In 1977, Scold in Chief Jimmy Carter predicted that mankind "could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade." Since then the world has consumed three times more oil than was then in the world's proven reserves."

But in the bold new world of the 21st century, surely we can at long last wash our hands of those messy old fossil fuels, right? Wrong. As Sarah Palin pointed out last month in an NRO opinion piece:

"We rely on petroleum for much more than just powering our vehicles: It is essential in everything from jet fuel to petrochemicals, plastics to fertilizers, pesticides to pharmaceuticals. According to the Energy Information Administration, our total domestic petroleum consumption last year was 19.5 million barrels per day (bpd). Motor gasoline and diesel fuel accounted for less than 13 million bpd of that. Meanwhile, we produced only 4.95 million bpd of domestic crude. In other words, even if we ran all our vehicles on something else (which won’t happen anytime soon), we would still have to depend on imported oil. And we’ll continue that dependence until we develop our own oil resources to their fullest extent."

Will says the demand for oil and gas is simply growing at such a rapid pace that the world is not likely to outgrow it's need for the stuff anytime soon:

"Keith O. Rattie, CEO of Questar Corporation, a natural gas and pipeline company, says that by 2050 there may be 10 billion people demanding energy -- a daunting prospect, considering that of today's 6.2 billion people, nearly 2 billion "don't even have electricity -- never flipped a light switch." Rattie says energy demand will grow 30 percent to 50 percent in the next 20 years and there are no near-term alternatives to fossil fuels."

Wind and solar power combined account for only one-sixth of 1 percent of U.S. energy consumption. Even if we were to embark on a crash program to develop renewables, and even with nuclear added to the mix, we will still need petro. But despite the fact that we've been extracting oil and gas for over a century, there's plenty more of it to be had:

"Edward L. Morse, an energy official in Carter's State Department, writes in Foreign Affairs that the world's deep-water oil and gas reserves are significantly larger than was thought just a decade ago, and high prices have spurred development of technologies -- a drilling vessel can cost $1 billion -- for extracting them."

So just how much oil and gas is still under our feet?

"Rattie says U.S. known reserves of natural gas, which are sure to become larger, exceed 100 years of supply at the current rate of consumption. BP recently announced a 'giant' oil discovery beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Yergin, writing in Foreign Policy, says "careful examination of the world's resource base ... indicates that the resource endowment of the planet is sufficient to keep up with demand for decades to come."

Significant new discoveries have been made in Louisiana (Haynesville Shale) and the Ozarks (Fayetteville Shale). And of course in Sarah Palin's Alaska, plentiful oil and gas reserves are under the North Slope and off the 49th States's shores. They are mostly conventional deposits, so no expensive new technologies are required to extract them.

All that is standing between domestic oil and gas supplies and our need for them are the environmentalists. Will say the environmental lobby will continue to say that fossil fuels are scarce resources because they believe that scarcity demands that government put its jack booted foot down (on our necks and in the way of domestic energy security) and allocate those "scarce" resources. Statism is a way of thinking which demands constant manufactured self-justification because it is a false doctrine.

Sarah Palin's argument to the environmentalists is this:

"Many of the countries we’re forced to import from have few if any environmental-protection laws, and those that do exist often go unenforced. In effect, American environmentalists are preventing responsible development here at home while supporting irresponsible development overseas."

"My home state of Alaska shows how it’s possible to be both pro-environment and pro-resource-development. Alaskans would never support anything that endangered our pristine air, clean water, and abundant wildlife (which, among other things, provides many of us with our livelihood). "

If only they would remove their fingers from inside their ear canals, stop chanting "we can't hear you" and listen, for a change.

- JP