If there's a single idea that the oil industry has peddled to persuade the Obama administration to approve the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, it's this: tar sands oil might be more polluting than even dirty old regular oil, but it's better to get our energy from our ally Canada than from unstable oil suppliers in the Middle East or elsewhere.
In practice, the opposite is true: drilling in North America is the single greatest threat to our nation's energy security.
Here's the reality: protecting the United States' energy security means keeping our continent's oil in the ground for when we need it in an emergency. The United States and Canada combined hold less than 5 percent of the world's proven oil reserves. Thanks in part to expanded domestic drilling during the Obama administration, we're depleting those reserves at a high rate. That means we have far less oil to fall back on in the event of true emergency, like an oil embargo or a major war when access to foreign oil supplies becomes difficult or even impossible.
If we're really concerned about security, tar sands oil should be a last-gap, man-the-barricades option -- something we as a society hope we never have to use. That's true to an extent for our domestic supplies of oil in general, whether offshore Arctic oil or the dregs left over at the bottom of the "stripper wells" that dot the Great Plains. We should leave them aside now, and hope that by the time we get into a serious security pickle, we've created a 100 percent clean energy economy that avoids the awful choice pundits seem to love to imagine between security, growth, and a living planet.
To understand how urgent it is that we curtail domestic drilling, consider this: if the United States were cut off today from all sources except Canada, we'd have only eight years left at current consumption levels. And that amount gets lower every day as the government issues additional domestic drilling leases.
Looking at domestic production as a threat to national security, rather than something that boosts it, may seem to turn conventional wisdom on its head, but in fact it's how domestic oil drilling was viewed almost as soon as large Middle East supplies came online in the post World War II years.
Following this "conservation theory," the federal government and others pushed hard to tap new Middle Eastern oil supplies, primarily so we wouldn't deplete our own. "If we ever got into another World War it is quite possible that we would not have access to reserves held in the Middle East, but in the meantime use of those reserves would prevent the depletion of our own, a depletion which may be serious within the next 15 years," wrote powerful World War II Navy Secretary James Forrestal, summarizing the postwar security consensus.
It's important to contrast this depletion reality with the old canard that the oil industry and its backers continue to push: that drilling domestically somehow reduces the flow of money to the Middle East and other unstable oil suppliers. In practice, basic oil industry economics show the opposite.
Because Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil is so much cheaper to produce and more plentiful than remaining domestic oil reserves, those countries can almost always outcompete domestic U.S. competitors and still maintain their enormous profit margins and high levels of production.
Saudi and Iraqi oil, for instance, costs just $4-$6 per barrel to produce with another $2-$3 tacked on for transportation costs (there are similar costs for Iranian). They will always be able to beat, for instance, productions costs for tar sands oil, which clock in at a minimum of $29 per barrel, with similar costs for other domestic sources.
To be sure, there are limits to how much oil even Saudi Arabia can draw at any given time without undermining its long term production capacity, but it and other major oil producers are well within this barrier and retain enormous "swing" production capacity.
Of course, there's no doubt that our addiction to oil props up petrocracies and funds terror groups. But expanding domestic production, especially through carbon-intense tar sands development, will do little or nothing to change that, even as it imposes serious environmental damage on our continent's great natural treasures and worsens climate change.
What we need to do instead is move as rapidly as possible to get off oil entirely by fully implementing and further tightening the Obama administration's strong fuel efficiency standards, putting a price on carbon pollution, ending oil subsidies, electrifying our vehicle fleet with clean energy, boost mass transit, and use the full force of our diplomacy to get other major consuming countries like China to do the same.
That will create true American energy security without setting off a carbon bomb that threatens the entire planet, USA very much included.
Follow Glenn Hurowitz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/glennhurowitz
Tar Sands and the Carbon Numbers - NYTimes.com
Stop the Tar Sands | Greenpeace International
Obama and the Tar Sands Pipeline » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts ...
Canadian Oil Sands — National Geographic Magazine
Tar Sands Pipeline Plan Renews Energy vs. Environment Debate ...
Ten years ago, it was less than an 8 years supply, and natural gas was running out.
The part that clowns like this fail to understand is that development of the resource, and developing the knowledge to better extract the resource, go hand in hand. Drillers learn while they earn.
The oil sands prove it - the projected reserves has more than tripled over the last decade.
Shale gas proves it - projected recervers increasing even faster than oil sands.
Lets elect pro-drilling Perry, and get serious about N. American energy!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14214771
Chinese state oil firm buys Canadian oil sands producer
The Syncrude extraction facility is one recipient of Chinese investment
Chinese state oil company CNOOC has agreed to buy Canadian oil sands producer OPTI for $2.1bn
Green energy, rooftop pv solar, offshore wind and waste bio char bio fuels, is cheaper, faster to install, forever, clean, safe, 24/7 in combination.
Great chart of energy source amounts: http://cleantechnica.com/2011/08/23/solar-power-intro-3-key-solar-power-points-top-solar-power-news/
If you want to reduce oil dependence, just add another $100 per bbl tax onto all oil, domestic and imported. The Saudi Arabia and Venezuela rulers already are collecting about 75$ per bbl in the form of taxes, royalties, profits, etc. If we cut payroll taxes the same amount as an oil tax (revenue neutral) we would create a massive economic stimulus as everyone tries to minimize his "oil tax" by using less oil.
The fact that burning the tar sand oil put’s our climate over 600ppm of CO2 - "game over for our climate," says James Hansen, NASA climatologist. Mass extinction? I guess that's a movement builder, right?
And now here, this premise that hoarding *our* (in a North American sense) oil reserves as a last mile fuel for our bloated, fossil fuel obsessed, and tragically over extended military to a) come home one last time or b) fight to the death in every last suffocating province on the globe is offered. Welcome to the fold, "concerned about fuel resources in a collapsing global economy" guy!
And I mean it sincerely. This idea is *that* bad. Even the worst people you can imagine can position themselves in ethical opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline. I mean, unless the person in question has utter world destruction in mind, their plans are just weak excuses for an evil plot.
There is much to do to demonstrate opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. President Obama decides in November. Visit www.tarsandsaction.org to take action.
Our approach seems to be, based on the vested interests of oil industry profits over public health and future generations (their own kids and grandkids ...) seems to be extracting every last bit of fossil fuel for as long as we possibly can before moving to something else. I'm truly afraid for future generations ... in the not so distant future ... that is a terrible thing to do.
As it's been said, we did not leave the stone age because we ran out of stones. We should likewise move on from the fossil fuel age now, because we have better alternatives. If we directed a modicum of oil subsidies to produce them, clean, renewable energy technologies would be a quickly growing industry -- much better for all of us.
Thanks for the article and the opportunity to respond.
Cheers, Dolly Garlo
www.creatinglegacy.com
Diesel at $20 per barrel is in pilot plant production from sunlight, water, CO2 and bacteria.
See Moving beyond Oil on the Aesop Institute website for more about this and other Black Swans: Highly improbable innovations with huge implications.
A little recognized threat from solar storms can collapse the power grid in large areas of the nation for months according to NASA.
Nuclear plants without grid power for a month are meltdown candidates.
Preventing that nightmare is possible. Accelerating decentralized cheap green energy is a wise insurance policy. See other posts on the Aesop Institute site for a few suggestions and details.