Drilling Our Way to a Dead Economy?

In a full-page spread in today’s Washington Post, some players in the energy industry take an opportunity to congratulate Congress for allowing a 26-year-old moratorium on new offshore oil drilling to expire.

That move, the companies postulate, “may prove to be a significant measure in addressing our long-term fiscal health.”

Really?

Forget, for a moment, that oil is a finite resource that’s difficult to locate and filthy to extract. Forget that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita spilled 685,000 gallons into the Gulf in 2006, and Hurricane Ike spilled at least another 500,000 gallons more this year. Forget also that the United States sits on just 3 percent of the planet’s known reserves.

The real issue is economic, and the Energy Dept. has determined that opening the outer continental shelf to new exploration won’t have a tangible impact on production or prices before 2030.

That’s 22 years away.

Imagine, while we continue to peck away at fossil fuels, what Europe and Japan will be doing over that span to develop renewable energies, cleaner fuels and the engines that will run off them. Imagine the myriad industries that will arise from that development, the remarkable products devised and the countless jobs created.

In 2030, just as our expanded oil drilling is projected to benefit consumers, consumers may very well have graduated to another generation of vehicles fueled by something much cleaner than petrol. Honda, after all, is already selling zero-emission hydrogen-cell cars in California.

As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has pointed out, clean energy remains a fledgling enterprise, and “the country that most owns the clean power industry is going to most own the next great technology breakthrough.” The focus on more drilling, he adds, “is a strategy for making America a second-rate power and economy.”

That’s a prediction much different from the one (unbiased, we’re sure) put forth by the energy industry. But if he’s right, new drilling — while it might prove a wonderful short-term boon to the oil industry — will have come a far cry from healing our long-term economic troubles.