oil spill — VOICES for REASON

To me, the most interesting part of a recent New York Times feature describing corruption in the relationship between certain oil companies and the Minerals and Management Service is a passing reference to what the Gulf Coast was like before deepwater drilling.

For years, fading interest in the Gulf of Mexico had punished the local economy and left Louisiana to mourn its “Dead Sea.” Now, rising oil prices and new technology were setting off the deep-water version of a gold rush.

We have heard endless stories about how the oil spill has “ruined” the Gulf–the same Gulf the administration is now admitting it is already safe to eat from. But while the dangers of drilling accidents have been overblown, the fundamentally productive, life-giving nature of oil drilling has been largely evaded. We should remember that it was oil drilling that brought the “Dead Sea” to life.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

As an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and a champion of America’s abundant oil use, it is rare that I get taken to task for being too tame in my defense of oil and in my expose of oil’s anti-industrial opponents.

But a superb letter to the editor in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal by Paul Gilmour does just that. Responding to my point in my op-ed last week that oil spill hysteria ignores that “large amounts of oil enter the ocean every year through naturally occurring oil seeps,” he writes:

the situation is even more idiotic than the one Mr. Epstein describes.

Most of the oil in the Santa Barbara Channel and on nearby beaches comes from natural leakage of buried reservoirs, not man-made spills. Europeans who visited the area in the 16th century reported the sea was covered by a “sheen of oil, visible for as far as the eye could see,” and that local Indians waterproofed baskets and canoes with tar collected on beaches. It is estimated that, yearly, these seeps release the equivalent of one third of the oil spilled by Exxon Valdez.

Seeps of oil are common in coastal California, having given rise to such place-names as Oil Creek, Oildale, Brea (Spanish “tar”) and Coal Oil Point. By far the best known is the La Brea Tar Pits, located in downtown Los Angeles.

Wouldn’t it be nice if reporters actually told us this stuff, instead of only reporting things that reaffirm to them that oil is an “addiction”?

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I have an op-ed piece entitled “Obama Follows Nixon on Oil Spill.” It explains how Richard Nixon’s anti-oil, anti-development response to the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 helped bring about an energy crisis–and how President Obama’s policies are ominously similar. Read it here.

In general, I have found that studying the history of oil is essential for understanding the present world. For example:

• How did so much of the world’s oil end up in the hands of dictators even though it was discovered by citizens of free countries?
• How is the history of oil connected to the history of terrorism?
• What policies led to the greatest amount of production and innovation, and what caused the least?

I cover these and many more questions in my course “The Triumph and Tragedy of the Oil Industry.” Listen to it online or download in MP3 here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the Wall Street Journal, my colleague Alex Epstein argues that overreaction to the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill left the country dangerously vulnerable. The piece begins:

Which former president does Barack Obama most resemble? When it comes to handling oil spills, the answer is Richard Nixon. Like our current president, Nixon too presided over a major offshore oil blowout—the three million gallon Santa Barbara spill of 1969. And, like Mr. Obama, Nixon responded by whipping up anti-oil sentiment and passing a sweeping moratorium on drilling.

This parallel is important to keep in mind, because Nixon’s reaction helped cause the worst energy crisis in American history.

Read the whole thing.

As Americans ponder how to react to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, with many calling for massive restrictions on oil drilling, it’s important to know the story of the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969–and the disastrous American reaction to it.

Daniel Yergin summarizes the spill and the ensuing outcry in The Prize:

in January 1969, the drilling of an offshore well in the Santa Barbara channel encountered an unexpected geological anomaly, and as a result, an estimated six thousand barrels of oil seeped out of an uncharted fissure and bubbled to the surface. A gooey slick of heavy crude oil flowed unchecked into the coastal waters and washed up on thirty miles of beaches. The public outcry was nationwide and reached right across the political spectrum. The Nixon Administration imposed a moratorium on California offshore development, in effect shutting it down.

The Santa Barbara outcry and ensuing restrictions on drilling started right before the 1970s…which turned out to be one of the most traumatic decades energy-wise in recent history. The decade was notable for scarce energy, the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, gasoline shortages, and the belief that energy would never again become abundant and affordable. But underlying all that were the post-Santa Barbara domestic restrictions on energy development, particularly offshore drilling. American companies had had plans to develop plentiful oil reserves in Alaska and off the coast of California, reserves that would greatly increase our flexibility in a then-volatile international oil market, but an oil spill in Santa Barbara changed all that.

Yergin writes:

However great the need for oil, the leak increased opposition to energy development in other environmentally sensitive areas, including the most promising area in all of North America, the one most likely to stem the decline in American production….Alaska.

Today, we face a similar situation. An offshore oil spill–a very unfortunate, very rare, but still inevitable part of offshore drilling–is empowering the forces who are against offshore drilling, period, even though such drilling is a means to a resource indispensable to our standard of living.

And to learn the story of the 1970s in detail, I refer you to Part 3 of my course on the history of oil, “The Triumph and Tragedy of the Oil Industry,” available here. (The story begins around the 14 minute mark and ends just after the 29 minute mark.)

Image: Wikimedia Commons