Letters to the Editor
RobbySh
Published Letters: 138
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Knee jerks on oil
[Read the article: McCain's offshore oil-drilling flip-flop]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ms Walsh tells me a lot when she writes:
My first job out of college was at a Santa Barbara paper in the early 1980s, where politics was still dominated by a coalition of Democrats and enlightened Republicans horrified by the nightmare of the 1969 oil spill off the coast more than a decade earlier. I came of age believing environmentalism was a bipartisan concern.
Yes, Ma'am, BUT.
Things do change a lot in forty years. I just have to look in the mirror ro know that.
IAC, as someone raised in the East Texas Oil Field, at one time the largest oil find in the world, I never cease to be amazed by the naivete of sophisticates about he oil industry.
They love its products: they hate the trade-offs, and they hate the people who make it run.
And of course, they haven't a clue about the way the industry functions:
As a "products: of the East Texas Field, I take a back seat to no one in my contempt for "Big Oil," They are the ones, by the way, who said that no oil could be fond in East Texas. Their "experts" said so. Then Dad Joiner with a broekn down rig drilled a couple of holes that proved them wrong and left them scrambling to obtain leases, right lone with the small oil men, and losing half the time because the ordinary small oil man knew how to talk with the local cotton farmers because they were often children of cotton farmers themselves. The "majors" still managed to buy up a lot of the field, but they had to buy out ther leases of others. So much of the field was developed by small oil men, unlike almost any other.
The downside of this was overdrilling. Until proration was enacted in the mid-30s, there was a made scramble to drill wells. Too many wells, too much oil, a mad scramble for riches. In the end the majors did serve their prime purpose, which was to restore order to production.
That is the paradox of Big Oil. More often than not, it is too damn inefficent to go out and find new fields, and even when it comes in to develop these fields, the care and feeding of their huge bureaucracies limit the return to stockholders to a small percentage. The parsimony of a John D. Rockefeller has long since departed from the attotudes of their top officials. They squander money like governments agencies.
Well, not quite. None of the Majors squanders money like the national oil companies of, say. Mexico. The Oil Lobbies in Washington do put money into the pockets of politicians, but as bad as our guys seems to be, they are nothing like the myriads of greedy pols in Mexico and elsewhere.
Now as Far as that oil spill, Ms. Walsh, you all don't know when you have won. I can remember stopping along the coast of California a few years after the spill. My kids got of the van and, yes, I was astonished when they came back, their clothes covered in oil. But no such spill could happen today. No such spill like the one in Alaska could happen, because ships are not built the same way. Drilling rigs in the Gulf Of Mexico have been redeone in a way that produces no spills at all. You may or may not have noticed that Katrina did not produce an oil slicks. heck, fertilizer running down the Mississipi and produced a da spot in the Gulf, but the fish are thriving near oil platforms overrun by that storm.
The problem is that you all want the benefits of oil without paying for it, paying much at all. Including the giving up of utopians ideas.
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Sacrifice
[Read the article: Ask Pablo]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Few of the greenies who are into the trendy conservation methods are willing to sacrifice any of their creature comforts. They don't want to end the industrial revolution, just slow it down. But to what speed? How slow can we fly the airplane without stalling it?
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Oil
[Read the article: Slick John McCain and the offshore oil ruse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]O.K. then, do you want to halt the industrial revolution, or just slow it down? If so, at what speed? That's my question to enviromentalists. For there is no alternative on the technnological horizon for energy on fossil fuels. Obama talks about moonshot or a manhattan project style programs to develop these alternatives. But in each case, the fundamental science was already known. Each was essentially an engineering program to implement that science. Breakthoughs were essentially break throughs in implementation.
Unfocused grants of money is likely to lead to boondoggles like the programs initiated by
Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. And sometimes we do realize how difficult it is to produce a
scientific break-though on demand, as with the limited results we have got from AIDs research despite the billions thrown at it. The money may cause the conditions, may create the envrioment that leads the right people in the field, but as in life timing is everything. Most marriages are not arranged by dating services, few geniuses are ferreted out by standardized tests. The converence of intellectual forces that produce insights are unpredictable.
No, we cannot "drill our way out of this," but drilling will buy time, decades. Trying to scare people with talk about global warning, will only work if it does not throttle the industry that is likely to produce the enviroment--and money - for technological advance.
You are not going to save the planet by forcing people onto bicycles. You might even entertain the possibility that the planet really don't need saving.