Senate Hearings On Lifting US Crude Oil Export Ban Don't Even Mention The Environment Once
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Lifting the export ban, several panelists argued, would allow the United States to leverage more power over potential oil sanctions by assuring that the international market would remain stable. It would also, panelists said, move the center of the international oil market away from unstable countries — both Russia and Iran merited a mention — stabilizing the overall supply. Domestically, Carlos Pascual, fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, argued that lifting the export ban would lower gas prices and boost the U.S. economy. “The critical focus on the part of Americans is price,” Pascual said. “Every single study that has been done by a major institution has come to the same conclusion: lifting the export ban will reduce the price of gasoline in the United States,” while adding $38.1 billion to the U.S. GDP by 2020.
In all these calculations, however, there was one glaring omission: no panelist — or senator — talked about how lifting the export ban would impact the environment. “It feels ridiculous to have a discussion about lifting the ban on oil exports and not talk about climate change,” Karthik Ganapathy, U.S. communications director at 350.org, told ThinkProgress. “What it boils down to is lifting the ban encourages and incentivizes oil production in the U.S. and that’s the wrong direction.”
Lifting the crude oil export ban would increase demand for oil in the international market, which would incentivize U.S. oil companies to expand their businesses and explore new options for drilling. Most likely, that would mean the extraction of tight oil reserves — the kind of petroleum extracted from shale or sandstone through hydraulic fracking.
“Our concern is that we need to be moving away from oil,” said David Turnbull, campaigns director at Oil Change International. “We need to be not relaxing U.S. oil regulations in the context of the climate crisis.”
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http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/03/20/3636291/oil-export-environmental-impacts/
