Kunstler - Drill! Drill! Drill! - Why Larry Kudlow Is Wrong About This

[hatrack]

Every night Larry Kudlow goes on CNBC at 7:00 misinforming the American public about our oil situation. His mantra: "...drill drill drill...." By this he means that American oil companies should be permitted to drill on all the continental shelves offshore, up in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and anywhere else.

I agree ! We should drill drill drill -- because once we give the go ahead for this, we will discover the hard way that it will not solve our oil problem. Here is what Matt Simmons wrote to me in an email (He says substantially the same thing in this CNBC "Squawkbox" clip:

"I have been strong advocate for past 20 years on the urgent need to shoot marine seismic (paid for by our government so they create some knowledge of where most likely structures to drill for might be located.) Once this very extensive marine survey is taken, lease sales could take place and winning bidders would then scramble to find enough offshore rigs to begin the most extensive search for offshore oil in the industry's history.

Had all this started in the late 1980's, we might today have located two or three North Seas, and we might have merely proved there are no great hidden offshore oil and gas fields around our OCS waters. Sadly, the Green's were violently opposed to this experiment on grounds we would spill too much oil. It was impossible to do this since exploration does not flow oil. But facts were deemed irrelevant. So we blew this window. It still makes sense to begin this long process of finding out what might be in our own back yard but it will take at least 15 years before any significant oil production would be likely. The longer we delay, the more irrelevant all this becomes."

It becomes irrelevant because this will never offset the depletion occurring throughout the world plus the steep fall-off in exports from Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, Russia, and the North Sea that have already commenced. We also don't have fifteen years to prop up the systems we are currently running for everyday life, including suburbia, Happy Motoring, the airline industry, Big Box Shopping, just-in-time food deliveries, air-conditioning places like Phoenix, Houston, Orlando, and Las Vegas, heating one-story sprawling centralized schools and fueling the yellow bus fleets that service them. . . . You get the picture? All this stuff is toast. And so is the economy that accompanies them.

EDIT

http://www.kunstler.com/Grunt_drill.html

[Turbineguy]

1. Kudlow is an idiot.

[jwirr]

2. So it is time to make some changes. I love Kuntsler. He makes it

so plain.

[NickB79]

3. In other words, if we had drilled in the 80's, we would have actually moved to renewables SOONER

As strange as that sounds, it does actually make sense when you think about it. If we had done extensive surveys decades ago, we wouldn't be discussing how much "undiscovered" reserves of oil there might be in the Arctic and offshore; if they existed after the surveys, they would have to be small to have escaped detection and thus not significant. And once you have hard figures showing you only have enough oil for X amount of years, it kills these utopian "massive untapped oilfields" fantasies like a sledgehammer to the head.

Damn. Now we're stuck pinning our last hope on new drilling to save us, taking valuable resources away from renewable energy resources.