A Few Shiny Pebbles

The difficult part of an argument is not to defend one’s opinion but rather to know it. --- Andre Maurois

Some of the most important—and imperative—issues in our lives involve energy production and usage, and for the first time in a long time in this country we have finally reached a point where the public is demanding action: begin drilling! This means that we are going to make decisions about energy that will set us on the beginning of one set of possible pathways into the future. We had better get it right. We must make our own views clear in order to make the best choices we can.

We are being told that conflicting information, for instance that, “We have to wean ourselves off oil”, that, “We need to become energy independent”, “We can’t drill our way out of this crisis”, “The oil companies have 68-million acres right now that they are not drilling on”, “We can’t do anything quickly to bring down the price of gas”, “It will take 10 years to get any gasoline from drilling”, and at the same time we are told that, “We need to open up the areas off the coast, in ANWAR, and in the mountain shale oil regions for drilling, with new methods which will take far less time than they used to.” We are told, “We need to follow environmental rules for stopping the Global Warming crisis” and also that, “Global Warming is not a crisis.”

Uh-Huh.

I have read a lot about these issues, and I have made up my mind that we have to drill in as many areas as possible, offshore, ANWAR, oil shale, everywhere, as long as, at the same time, developing other sources of fuel. I mean to post a series of essays on my blog over the next weeks, giving my reasons for that decision.

Where do I start? I can see several issues that absolutely must be addressed before we can make our decisions, but it’s hard to tell which should be considered first. I think I’ll work from the Macro to the Micro—the big picture first, and then the details.

A lot of the articles I’ve read add greatly to the knowledge-base from which I’ve made my decision, but I think, to begin, the things I’ve read miss some of what I think are the most important grounds for my decisions on oil drilling and energy policies. I think that this is because there is so much talk of what America needs now, what America will need for the short- and long-term future, about what will or won’t bring down the price of our gasoline, our need for energy independence, and such things—but the crucial background, over-arching issues, are almost completely missing from all this talk.

This current concentration on America and its local interests comes about from the fact that we are in the middle of a presidential election campaign, but we had better stop and think more clearly, and step back from the candidates and political parties to think in larger terms. Once we have really looked at certain crucial issues, and made some crucial decisions, we can always return to our political squabbles and fight over which party is going to grab onto which arguments. However, the main work leading to our decisions must be carried out apart from partisan emotionalism.

So, first, we can’t look at the just United States right now. We have to look at the world itself. And I don’t mean as a “globalist”, or a member of the United Nations, or in terms of which countries we should have diplomatic relationships and/or meetings with and which not—no, we need to be far more fundamental than that. And I’m not talking here about the Global Warming issue, which needs a discussion of its own. Here, for this discussion, we have to look at the world as a place where the USA is part of a gigantic economic infrastructure composed of friends, enemies, and a lot of countries that lean one way or another depending on momentary alignments and enmities, all dependent mostly on oil and electricity. This is not the “Let’s join hands and sing” kind of relationship; rather, it is hard reality. We cannot separate ourselves from the world infrastructure.

Every day of the year, very single country in the world must seek to create and obtain, one way or another, as near as possible to the total amount of oil and electricity it needs to survive, and, if possible, to do as best they can to grow economically beyond that. Whatever energy policies we come up with as Americans had better take into consideration, as fundamental and irrevocable, our present and future relationships with those other countries with which we share this world. No country can isolate itself any longer. All the talk about American energy independence is problematic in a world where everything and everybody is connected economically, where imports and exports are vital components of economic existence and growth, where major powers need strong militaries operating across the world, and where there are large international responses when emergencies happen.

We have to recognize that the world uses over 80-million barrels of oil every day for the petroleum part of its energy requirements. Think about this for a moment. That’s a vast amount of oil. With the economic growth of countries such as China and India, (and eventually the Third World regions of Africa, Asia, South and Central America, etc.), the demand for energy, for more and more barrels-a-day, will grow larger and larger with each passing day. They say that the US is 5% of the world’s people and 25% of the world’s petroleum usage, but that doesn’t mean that as the percent of our oil usage drops it will be because of our lessening our demand for oil; rather, it will mean that the rest of the world will start catching up with us in usage, and it means that the need for oil will rapidly grow far beyond that 80-million barrels a day. It is not a zero-sum game.

Just imagine for a moment the physical and human infrastructure now in operation necessary for those 80-million barrels of oil per day: supplying, producing, maintaining, and manning oil wells, delivery of product to shipping point, shipping all over the world as freight in heavy trucks and ships, pipelines and other ways, in refining the petroleum into constituent products for supplying manufacturing of products and for using as energy, in transporting those refined constituents, in using them in manufacture and in selling them to the public. Think of how much of the world’s employment and energy use goes with just getting the petroleum to market to refining and to the end-user for use in manufacturing and transportation. Think of how much money is changing hands, and to whom those hands belong.

This is just the first part of the background that must be taken into consideration.

There is also a huge infrastructure involved with electricity, the other major power source in this background discussion. If you're wondering where solar panels, geothermal, wind, coal, hydroelectric, nuclear, etc. are not the issue in this background overview, it is because all these energy technologies are used to generate electricity. So electricity is the next part of my search for answers.

Trackposted to The Virtuous Republic, Perri Nelson's Website, third world county, Faultline USA, DragonLady's World, Right Truth, The World According to Carl, Shadowscope, DragonLady's World, , The Pink Flamingo, , Democrat=Socialist, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.