por admin » Lun Oct 04, 2010 1:39 pm
40 anios de panico
Cual panico, pareceria que conseguimos todo el petroleo que queremos a los precios que estamos dispuestos a pagar
En el Senado en Noviembre Marvin Odum de Shells (felicitaciones para el que tuvo el coraje, no como el que estaba sentado a su costado (BP) les dio catedra acerca de los derrames de petroleo, la historia de los derrames de petroleo y la respuesta a los derrames de petroleo.
Dijo: US importa aproximadamente el 60% del petroleo que necesita. Eso no es necesario...nosotros no deberiamos esar satisfechos con que otras nacionas produzcan la energia que usamos.
Los politicos nos han vendido la idea de que nuestras reservas estan en peligro, que los que nos venden el petroleo van a terminar con nosotros, que existe una crisis de energia. Miren la television desde los 70s nos tienen con el ethanol, hibridos, carbon, exploracion a profundida, gas natural, etc.
Algunos confundidos piensan que fuimos a Iraq por su petroleo, lo que hubiera sido algo como gastar un dolar para ganar un centavo. Saddam nos habria vendido todo el petroleo que hubieramos querido y Kuwait tambien si lo hubieramos dejado.
Algun dia algun profesor de universidad escribira un libro acerca del mas fracasado matrimonio politico de todos los tiempos- el de los que creen en el calentamiento global y los que creen en el panico de la energia.
La energia deberia funcionar con menor intervencion del gobierno, de manera no distorsionada, despues de todo el mercado de petroleo no es mas que un robusto, confiable y frecuentemente volatil mercado.
40 Years of Energy Panic
We seem to get all the oil we want at a price we're willing to pay.By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR..
The scene was a Senate hearing last November, before the Gulf oil spill. To his credit (and unlike a BP exec seated nearby), Shell's Marvin Odum went on about the risk of spills, the history of spills, the response to spills.
Then he launched into a section that began: "The U.S. imports approximately 60% of its petroleum needs. This is not necessary. . . . We should not be satisfied with having other nations produce their energy for our use."
No, our point isn't that fear of foreigners is being used by Big Oil to con us into taking unacceptable environmental risks. If anything, BP's success in recapping the Macondo well suggests that, had a reliable blowout preventer been installed in the first place, BP's numerous errors needn't have resulted in any spill at all. Rather, our point is that the endless invocation of an alleged energy crisis is used to sell deep-water drilling because it's used to sell everything.
A Look at the Oil Drilling Process
Turn on the TV: ethanol, hybrid vehicles, electric vehicles, coal, offshore drilling, onshore drilling, wind, natural gas. Inflicted on us relentlessly since the 1970s, the most mischievous and misleading trope in American politics is the idea that our energy supplies are in danger, that foreigners are out to get us, that a crisis is upon us.
What exactly has been the record of poor, pitiful us during this time?
We seem to get all the oil we want at a price we're willing to pay. For three decades, our economy enjoyed one of its greatest boom periods ever—a boom that ended, ironically, not because of oil shortages, but because of overspending on giant houses far from town by people happily conditioned by the ubiquity and affordability of their energy supplies.
Never mind that Washington's price controls were to blame.
.And look at countries even more dependent on oil imports than ours. China and India have inaugurated two of the greatest growth stories in history. Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, much of Western Europe—states notorious for a paucity of natural resources—have built among the highest sustained living standards on the globe.
Some confused persons still think we invaded Iraq to get its oil, which would have been like spending a dollar to get a penny. Saddam would have sold us all the oil we wanted (and Kuwait's too) if we had just left him alone.
Now whole careers in the public eye are being built on the idea of peak oil—a geological conceit that produces scenarios of global catastrophe only because it omits the price mechanism, which has worked well for a century to adapt the world economy to whatever amount of oil is geologically available at a given time.
This isn't to say that oil isn't a political problem maker. Villains like Saddam want to steal it. As a fount of domestic patronage, it spoils, corrupts and degrades societies where control is handed to politicians. But for the rest of us, that corruption is mainly visited via policies peddled domestically with a heavy dose of energy panic.
Take the two scandals dogging BP lately. Britain's craven behavior toward a terrorism-sponsoring Libya partly arose from an exaggerated notion of Britain's stake in Libyan oil. The British, like us, have had no trouble buying all the oil they want on world markets.
And, in retrospect, the obvious question raised by the Macondo blowout is why anyone would bet their company by drilling in ultra-deep water where the consequences of a blowout can't quickly and economically be contained.
It turns out that one reason is the now-famous Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which capped oil-spill liability partly out of fears of jeopardizing the nation's energy. Even so, when the bill was debated, shipowners warned that any substantial liability at all might kill the global oil trade.
Well, if not in law then in practice, the cap has been repealed. We'll soon see on what terms shareholders and insurance markets are willing to back the search for oil in deep waters. Guess what? By properly pricing the risks of a deep-water blowout, we're likely to get much safer drilling.
Would that all our energy choices were allowed to work the same way, undistorted by rampant intervention premised on the false notion that the global oil market has proved to be anything other than what it is: robust, reliable, unfailing, if frequently volatile.
Even the greenies might be better off—Americans might be more amenable to modest energy taxes to fight global warming (if that's your cup of tea) if not preached into constant fear of energy shortages. Someday it will behoove a professor to write a book about the greatest failed political marriage of all time—the marriage of the global warming crowd with the energy panic crowd.
Look how little it has achieved despite commanding the airwaves, the media and nearly universal assent from the great and good. Why the marriage failed so abysmally is a question for another day. For now, it suffices simply to notice that it has.