Russ Steele
I have written about this before, why not drill our own oil and gas? Now Jonah Goldberg offers the President a suggestion, we can solve a lot of our economic problems by developing US oil and gas wealth.
Jonah Goldberg writing at National Review Online.
The objective case for developing our oil and gas wealth is pretty straightforward. With the exception of climate change, pretty much everything the Obama administration considers a major problem would be improved by opening the floodgates to new exploration.
The deficit? The oil industry already pays the U.S. treasury more than $95 million a day in taxes, rent, royalties, and the like. If you expand exploration, you expand revenues. According to estimates, if America unlocked its oil and gas reserves, the government could take in somewhere between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in additional revenue over the coming years. And that’s not counting the increased revenues from the stimulus of lower fuel and energy costs.
Trade imbalances? Domestic oil and gas is, by definition, not imported. The more we produce here, the less we import, or the more we can sell overseas. Either way, the trade deficit goes down and GDP goes up.
Jobs? You can’t drill for American oil or natural gas in China, Saudi Arabia, or anyplace other than America. Oil- and gas-exploration jobs pay more than twice the national average.
Just take a gander at North Dakota, where oil production is up 138 percent since 2008. The boom “has helped make its economy almost recession-proof,” writes American Enterprise Institute economist Mark Perry. North Dakota’s “jobless rate never exceeded 4.4 percent even during the Great Recession when the U.S. rate hit 10.1 percent.” North Dakota, with a $1 billion surplus, and the lowest unemployment rate in the country, has more jobs today than it did when the recession started in 2007. Perversely, as AEI’s Steve Hayward notes, if trends continue, North Dakota may well out-produce California and Alaska (it’s already zoomed past Oklahoma), not because California and Alaska are running out of oil, but because the feds keep their oil reserves under lock and key.
All in all, the American Petroleum Institute believes we may have 100 billion barrels of untapped oil — that’s 10 million barrels a day for 30 years, or the equivalent of our total imports of foreign oil.
Add the 250 years of natural gas reserves and we could be free of imported oil. Ben Emory, is looking for a discussion on peak oil. I wonder what his response would be to this proposal?
