About 40% of the oil and natural gas available on public lands is currently off-limits to drilling due to environmental constraints, according to a recent report by the U.S. Government’s Bureau of Land Management. These environmental constraints include the disruption to wildlife and natural habitats, potential pollution and water fouling concerns, and the permanent destruction of natural vistas. But even if these lands were made available to drilling, the oil companies don’t have enough drill rigs and drilling crews available to make use of them on an immediate basis. And if they were made accessible, would those additional resources make a significant dent in the cost of oil to consumers? Not likely, say the experts, the increased supply might not even equal the increased demand.
The infrastructure of imported oil supplied via ocean-going tankers filled from Middle East oil fields is still too easy and accessible. And if we built as many wind turbine farms as we could over the next 20 years, would that make a dent in the cost of oil? In a similar manner, not likely since at that rate those farms would still supply no more than a third of just the electric power we use, not our overall energy use. And if we all converted to electric cars as fast as we could, would that affect the cost of oil? Again, not in the short term since the auto manufacturers and the infrastructure can’t scale up fast enough.
Just as we learned in physics about the effects of large values of momentum, moving a billion-barrel ocean-going oil tanker from its established course even just a little bit has become a nearly impossible task.
So should we drill more on public lands? I believe that we should in moderation; we already work on public lands and the impact of more is unlikely to significantly diminish the overall level of our vast public holdings. The incursion of drill rigs on these lands is generally temporary until the fields run dry and they could return to a mostly natural state in 30 to 40 years when our overall energy economy should be significantly different than it is now. That’s assuming, of course, that we put rigid controls in place like we already do for the Alaskan drilling efforts.
It often is hard to accept that nothing is forever, that change in inevitable to our valued institutions of public lands. But the alternatives of having vast numbers of our population suffer permanent economic disruptions to their lives because of out-of-control rising costs due to mostly global effects are even harder to accept. There are no easy choices anymore.
But, even more difficult as it is to accept, the choices we eventually do make aren’t likely to have huge effects on the short-term outcome. Just as that tanker will change its course with small adjustments over a long time, our energy situation will inevitably change, it’s just going to take longer than we’d like. And in the interim, environmentalists and the economically disadvantaged are still both going to suffer.
