oil anniversary — VOICES for REASON

Every day, Americans use about 3 gallons of oil a day. That’s almost one billion gallons total.

It’s hard to find anyone who thinks this is a good thing. Indeed, the overwhelming view heard in our culture is that our use of oil is an “addiction”. This term was popularized by former President–and oilman–George W. Bush in his 2006 speech.

Barack Obama is even more opposed to oil: “the age of oil must end in our time,” he has declared unequivocally. And: “the country that faced down the tyranny of fascism and communism is now called to challenge the tyranny of oil.” (Note: our President is comparing our use of oil to movements that killed a combined 100 million people.)

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As I blogged recently, August 27 was the 150th anniversary of the oil industry.

Given that oil lit up the world in the 19th century and mobilized it in the 20th, and given that to this day oil generates 40% of energy worldwide, August 27, 2009 should have been a day of celebration. Above all, it should have been a day of celebration by the intellectuals who analyze the culture and by the oil industry itself. Instead, it was a day of silence.

Where were the tributes—or even critical retrospectives—in the leading newspaper op-ed pages last week? There were none in the Wall Street Journal, none in the New York Times, none in the Washington Post, none in the Los Angeles Times. I am grateful to Investor’s Business Daily for being the most prominent exception to this trend, and for choosing an op-ed I wrote to commemorate the occasion. The Wall Street Journal finally got around to publishing an oil piece on the following week (though hardly a celebratory one) by historian Daniel Yergin, but the lateness is almost more insulting to the anniversary of oil than not publishing anything.

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