The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

Opinion

Discussion

May 23, 2008

Guest columnist, Ken Midkiff: Era of cheap oil is gone

Pogo famously said “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

That is where we find ourselves when it comes to the high price per gallon of gasoline (which seems to go up almost daily).

While it is only human to want to blame someone, such as “liberals and environmentalists,” the fact is that we are all to blame. We have used oil and oil products, such as gasoline, as if there was no tomorrow.

Environmental groups and liberals in the U.S. Congress have decried the government largesse flowing to ethanol, which is extolled as a “green solution” by those who view “green” only as the color of money.

As has been pointed out many times, ethanol could not make it in a true free market economy. A corn grower pointed out that right now, ethanol production is subsidized at about 85 cents per gallon. Remove that 85 cents and ethanol plants would be money-losers and would go belly-up.

There are other problems with ethanol:

* Some scientists claim that it takes more energy than it produces. The corn grower I was speaking with told me that, due to more efficiencies in production, the ratio is currently 1:1. In short, it takes a gallon of energy to produce a gallon on energy. That’s hardly worth it.

* If every kernel of corn raised in this country were converted to ethanol, that fuel would meet about 7 percent of our energy demands.

* One unintended consequence of converting so much corn to ethanol is that food prices have skyrocketed to the point that people in developing nations can’t afford groceries and are quite literally starving.

Bottom line: Don’t blame environmentalists or liberals for our tax monies going to support ethanol production.

Those who would blame environmentalists and liberals for our current high gasoline prices are probably thinking of opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve or opposition to drilling on public lands. That’s all true; we are opposed to such. But, the amount of oil in ANWR would meet about 6 months’ worth of demands, and to achieve this modest amount, we would have decimated a relatively pristine area. Maybe ANWR isn’t very inviting to humans; but caribou love it. Caribou and drilling equipment, pipelines and other accouterments of the gas and oil industry don’t get along very well.

As to public lands, there’s lot of exploratory drilling going on, but so far no one has hit the Mother Load. Besides which, these lands belong to all of us — not to Exxon/Mobil, BP/Amoco or Sinclair. If there is oil out there —– which at this point is doubtful – it belongs to everyone, not to a few industries.

Nope. It ain’t liberals or environmentalists that should be singled out for blame. It is those other four fingers pointing back, and they’re pointing back to you and you and you and me (yes, even liberal environmentalists use too much, so maybe we are partly at fault).

Liberals and environmentalists have been advocating conservation and efficiency, not profligate use. We have been pushing for getting our energy from wind, sola, and other renewable sources, not fossil fuels that are finite and non-renewable in our lifetime.

The fact is we are running out of oil. We peaked in 1975 in the United States. There’s much data to suggest that other oil fields in the Middle East, South America, and Canada either have peaked or soon will. There will be a temporary reprieve as the current high price of crude will stimulate going back to areas in which oil production was previously uneconomical.

But make no mistake. The era of easily accessible cheap oil is gone. Tomorrow is here.

Ken Midkiff is a spokesman for the Sierra Club.

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