Click on WORD or PDF for full content
We begin today with a few items that will help us look at the good side of our use of oil. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe is first.
… The explosion of BP’s oil rig in the Gulf has been a calamity in so many ways, above all the loss of 11 human lives. With hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil gushing daily from the crippled wellhead, the environmental impacts have been excruciating. BP is responsible for a dreadful mess, one that will take years and many millions of dollars to clean up.
Awful as the catastrophe has been, however, life without oil would be far, far worse.
Americans consume oil not because they are “addicted’’ to it, but because it enriches their lives, making possible prosperity, comfort, and mobility that would have been all but unimaginable just a few generations ago. Almost by definition, an addiction is something one is healthier without. But oil-based energy improves human health and reduces poverty — it makes life longer, safer, and better. Addictions debase life. Oil improves and expands it.
“Oil may be the single most flexible substance ever discovered,’’ writes the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce in “Power Hungry,’’ a new book on the myths of “green’’ energy. “More than any other substance, oil helped to shrink the world. Indeed, thanks to its high energy density, oil is a nearly perfect fuel for use in all types of vehicles, from boats and planes to cars and motorcycles. Whether measured by weight or by volume, refined oil products provide more energy than practically any other commonly available substance, and they provide it in a form that’s easy to handle, relatively cheap, and relatively clean.’’ If oil didn’t exist, Bryce quips, we’d have to invent it.
Of course there are problems created by oil, as the Deepwater Horizon calamity so heartbreakingly demonstrates . …
Jonah Goldberg is next.
A rolling “dead zone” off the Gulf of Mexico is killing sea life and destroying livelihoods. Recent estimates put the blob at nearly the size of New Jersey.
Alas, I’m not talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As terrible as that catastrophe is, such accidents have occurred in U.S. waters only about once every 40 years (and globally about once every 20 years). I’m talking about the dead zone largely caused by fertilizer runoff from American farms along the Mississippi and Atchafalaya river basins. Such pollutants cause huge algae plumes that result in oxygen starvation in the Gulf’s richest waters, near the delta.
Because the dead zone is an annual occurrence, there’s no media feeding frenzy over it, even though the average annual size of these hypoxic zones has been about 6,600 square miles over the last five years, and they are driven by bipartisan federal agriculture, trade, and energy policies.
Indeed, as Steven Hayward notes in the current Weekly Standard, if policymakers continue to pursue biofuels in response to the current anti-fossil-fuel craze, these dead zones will get a lot bigger every year. A 2008 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that adhering to corn-based ethanol targets will increase the size of the dead zone by as much as 34 percent.
If all of our transport fuel came from biofuel, we would need 30 percent more land than all of the existing food-growing farmland we have today.
Of course, that’s just one of the headaches “independence” from oil and coal would bring. …
And Goldberg expands on his earlier piece.
… Everyone takes as a given that the environment would be better off without oil and coal. And it would be better off if there was a better fuel available. But, not counting nuclear, there isn’t. Not even close (as Ken Green notes earlier on this blog). And … fossil fuels have been an incalculable gift to mankind. Without fossil fuels, we might not have cut the Malthusian knot that was causing us to burn through a wide assortment of “renewable” resources.
Kerosene helped wean America (and everyone else) off our “addiction” to whales. Oil and coal helped end our addiction to wood for, well, everything. Wood was not only a heating fuel, it was instrumental to railroads and all manner of construction. Ronald Bailey has noted that “Railroads, the 19th century’s ‘modern’ form of transportation, consumed nearly 25 percent of all the wood used in America, for both track ties and fuel.” In 1900, New York City alone supported over 120,000 horses who befouled the water and the air in the city, but also required vast amounts of land to supply the hay that fueled them.
Today, more American land is covered by forests—by far—than at the end of the 19th century. By the 1860s, Massachusetts and Connecticut had lost 70 percent of their forests. Today nearly 70 percent of those states are forested again. Vermont was once nearly denuded but now nearly 80 percent of it is covered in trees. …
We followed Jonah’s link to Ken Green who imagines the speech the president should give;
… My fellow Americans, I am sure that we all grieve for the environmental and economic disaster that has befallen the states of the Gulf Coast, particularly already fragile Louisiana. Now, regrettably, they face damages from the worst oil spill in American history. We will do everything we can to help the people of the ravaged coastal states recover from this terrible environmental tragedy.
But, even in the midst of tragedy, we must acknowledge that we are an energy civilization, some would even say that we are an energy species. Our entire economy, everything we do, from the morning we wake through the hours we sleep, requires a constant flow of energy. Fossil fuels provide the vast majority of the energy we use, and for a very good reason: there are no economically viable, comparably useful alternatives, and there probably won’t be for many decades.
And then, fossil fuel alternatives come with their own environmental problems. Look at corn ethanol, which the previous administration favored. Production of corn ethanol has been environmentally ruinous, causing air pollution, water pollution, wildlife contamination with pesticides, coastal dead zones, and inflated food prices that increased famine around the world. The growing demand for bio-diesel has led to the razing of vast swaths of the world’s rainforest, which is being planted with oil palms. …
We have a picture, courtesy of the NY Times, that is a beautiful illustration of the stupidity of the state.
Speaking of oil, how’s things in the Middle East? Jennifer Rubin notes Obama is polling poorly there.
… All that suck-uppery, all that Israel-bashing, and yet Muslim countries like Obama less. One explanation may be that Obama hasn’t been supporting the aspirations, human rights, and religious freedom of the people of the Muslim world; instead, he’s been courting the despotic rulers of these countries.
And recall too that Obama’s approval in Israel is in the single digits.Obama has failed to endear the U.S. to the countries of the Middle East and, in fact, has alienated all sides. It is what comes from straddling, equivocating, dumping friends, and showing meekness to bullies. It seems that not even joining the thugocracies on the U.N. Human Rights Council has done the trick. So many “smart” diplomats, such putrid results.
Abe Greenwald has some thoughts on the subject.
Jen, forget the fact that Muslim publics don’t like Barack Obama as much as they once did. Consider this: “the new [Pew] poll does show a modest increase over the past year in support for suicide bombing being often or sometimes justifiable, with a rise in Egypt from 15% to 20% and in Jordan from 12% to 20%.” …
… Why did support for suicide bombing go up in the past year? In the U.S., our post-9/11 self-assessment is all about resenting the leader who took us into long and difficult fights. But the war against jihad plays out in Muslim publics as a war of ideas. For the endless jokes about his oratorical shortcomings, Bush articulated the choice with unsurpassed clarity: it’s Islamism v. democracy. What does each one offer? Islamism gives you a zombie doctrine of earthly denial so that you may, in death, triumph over your hopeless life. Under Bush, American democracy put your oppressive leaders on notice and gave you the hope, if not the actual opportunity, to change your hopeless life. Under Obama, democracy bows to your authoritarian king, extends an open hand to the autocrat who beats you over the head, and welcomes with open arms the dictator who tortured you in jail. Obama’s made the choice a no brainer. …
Turning to things domestic, Michael Barone thinks Obama’s thuggery is wearing thin.
Thuggery is unattractive. Ineffective thuggery even more so. Which may be one reason so many Americans have been reacting negatively to the response of Barack Obama and his administration to BP’s Gulf oil spill.
Take Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s remark that he would keep his “boot on the neck” of BP, which brings to mind George Orwell’s definition of totalitarianism as “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Except that Salazar’s boot hasn’t gotten much in the way of results yet.
Or consider Obama’s undoubtedly carefully considered statement to Matt Lauer that he was consulting with experts “so I know whose ass to kick.” Attacking others is a standard campaign tactic when you’re in political trouble, and certainly BP, which appears to have taken unwise shortcuts in the Gulf, is an attractive target.
But you don’t always win arguments that way. The Obama White House gleefully took on Dick Cheney on the issue of terrorist interrogations. It turned out that more Americans agreed with Cheney’s stand, despite his low poll numbers, than Obama’s. …
Mort Zuckerman covers international opinion of the prez.
… The reviews of Obama’s performance have been disappointing. He has seemed uncomfortable in the role of leading other nations, and often seems to suggest there is nothing special about America’s role in the world. The global community was puzzled over the pictures of Obama bowing to some of the world’s leaders and surprised by his gratuitous criticisms of and apologies for America’s foreign policy under the previous administration of George W. Bush. One Middle East authority, Fouad Ajami, pointed out that Obama seems unaware that it is bad form and even a great moral lapse to speak ill of one’s own tribe while in the lands of others.
Even in Britain, for decades our closest ally, the talk in the press—supported by polls—is about the end of the “special relationship” with America. French President Nicolas Sarkozy openly criticized Obama for months, including a direct attack on his policies at the United Nations. Sarkozy cited the need to recognize the real world, not the virtual world, a clear reference to Obama’s speech on nuclear weapons. When the French president is seen as tougher than the American president, you have to know that something is awry. Vladimir Putin of Russia has publicly scorned a number of Obama’s visions. Relations with the Chinese leadership got off to a bad start with the president’s poorly-organized visit to China, where his hosts treated him disdainfully and prevented him from speaking to a national television audience of the Chinese people. The Chinese behavior was unprecedented when compared to visits by other U.S. presidents.
Obama’s policy on Afghanistan—supporting a surge in troops, but setting a date next year when they will begin to withdraw—not only gave a mixed signal, but provided an incentive for the Taliban just to wait us out. The withdrawal part of the policy was meant to satisfy a domestic constituency, but succeeded in upsetting all of our allies in the region. Further anxiety was provoked by Obama’s severe public criticism of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his coterie of family and friends for their lackluster leadership, followed by a reversal of sorts regarding the same leaders. ..