Holman Jenkins, Jr.: Sitting in the Dark this Winter You Might Think About the Santa Barbara Spill of 1969
... By now millions of Americans have made themselves dependent on natural gas to heat their homes when gas was selling for $2. Two years ago, Fed Chairman Greenspan sounded the alarm and urged Congress to make way for new ports to bring liquefied natural gas from Qatar or Algeria. Nothing happened. In the futures markets last month, natural gas hit $14. No wonder Mr. Frist is eager to be seen naming a villain -- Big Oil -- and proposing windfall profits taxes and gouging investigations that would only make matters worse.
How did we get here? Mr. Frist's reaction is a perfect example. As far back as 1976, a study of House voting on natural gas bills helped inaugurate a new literature of "ideological shirking," poli-sci jargon for legislators voting against the interests of their constituents in order to affirm some sacred cow.
You can trace this effect in energy-related matters precisely to the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, which reduced all energy politics to the anti-business/pro-environment trope. Until that moment, there was little public opposition to energy development. The subsequent cost is laid out in a report last year from Argonne National Laboratory entitled "Environmental Policy and Regulatory Constraints to Natural Gas Production." It makes eye-opening reading. We might want to rethink geological depletion as the chief culprit.
Right off the top, bans on drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the East and West coasts deprived the country of 58 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (annual residential consumption is about five trillion). Notice that gas wells don't produce oil spills. As a statistical matter, very few oil spills come from drilling at all (most oil pollution doesn't even come from tanker accidents, but from countless smaller leakages).
The "pristine" Rocky Mountain Front has also been declared out of bounds -- another 86 trillion cubic feet. In 2001, a Forest Service bureaucrat ordained that no road building should disturb the tranquility of 58 million acres of federal forests -- foreclosing access to 11 trillion cubic feet. Bill Clinton used the 1906 Antiquities Act to take 5.6 million acres of federal lands out play by declaring them "national monuments," removing a trillion cubic feet.
These restrictions accumulated willy-nilly when energy prices were generally falling. Politicians found it easy to embrace bans based on polls in which voters casually affirm yes, they're against any drilling in this place or that. Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer has been running around demanding federal subsidies to build a pollution-spewing plant to turn his state's coal into synthetic oil and gas. Yet he'd rather bite the head off a snail darter than advocate opening up his Rocky Mountain vicinity to drilling. Voters are never asked to weigh their preference for a given pretty view against the cumulative effect of all the bans endorsed by one poll or another....
Read entire article at WSJ
How did we get here? Mr. Frist's reaction is a perfect example. As far back as 1976, a study of House voting on natural gas bills helped inaugurate a new literature of "ideological shirking," poli-sci jargon for legislators voting against the interests of their constituents in order to affirm some sacred cow.
You can trace this effect in energy-related matters precisely to the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, which reduced all energy politics to the anti-business/pro-environment trope. Until that moment, there was little public opposition to energy development. The subsequent cost is laid out in a report last year from Argonne National Laboratory entitled "Environmental Policy and Regulatory Constraints to Natural Gas Production." It makes eye-opening reading. We might want to rethink geological depletion as the chief culprit.
Right off the top, bans on drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the East and West coasts deprived the country of 58 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (annual residential consumption is about five trillion). Notice that gas wells don't produce oil spills. As a statistical matter, very few oil spills come from drilling at all (most oil pollution doesn't even come from tanker accidents, but from countless smaller leakages).
The "pristine" Rocky Mountain Front has also been declared out of bounds -- another 86 trillion cubic feet. In 2001, a Forest Service bureaucrat ordained that no road building should disturb the tranquility of 58 million acres of federal forests -- foreclosing access to 11 trillion cubic feet. Bill Clinton used the 1906 Antiquities Act to take 5.6 million acres of federal lands out play by declaring them "national monuments," removing a trillion cubic feet.
These restrictions accumulated willy-nilly when energy prices were generally falling. Politicians found it easy to embrace bans based on polls in which voters casually affirm yes, they're against any drilling in this place or that. Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer has been running around demanding federal subsidies to build a pollution-spewing plant to turn his state's coal into synthetic oil and gas. Yet he'd rather bite the head off a snail darter than advocate opening up his Rocky Mountain vicinity to drilling. Voters are never asked to weigh their preference for a given pretty view against the cumulative effect of all the bans endorsed by one poll or another....