March 11, 2011
Yes, this horrible segment on my local NPR affiliate WAMU repeated the same nonsense as yesterday. It told listeners that the key policy choice facing the country is whether we will just let the Martians take over the planet, as advocated by President Obama, or stand up and fight, as demanded by the Republicans.
Okay, that was not quite how the segment ran, but it is pretty damn close. The segment told us that the main energy choice facing the country is whether we focus on producing oil and gas in the United States or we focus on switching over to alternative energy.
This is not true. There is no option to make the country independent of foreign energy by increasing domestic production of oil and gas. Let me repeat that so that even a top reporter at a major news outlet can understand it.
There is no option to make the country independent of foreign energy by increasing domestic production of oil and gas.
The reason is simple, the United States does not have enough oil and gas to replace the amount that it imports even if we drilled every last barrel out of every environmentally sensitive region in the country. Just as the city of Tokyo does not have enough oil to be energy self-sufficient, neither does the United States have this option.
There are zero, nada, no projections that show that oil and gas reserves in the United States are large enough to allow the country to replace the fossil fuels that it imports. It currently imports about 11.5 million barrels a day, down from its pre-recession level of 13 million. Its domestic production is about 5.6 million barrels a day, and dropping. (It had been around 10 million a day thirty years ago.)
Projections from the Energy Information Agency show that if we drill everything in sight, we may be able to increase domestic production by 1-2 million barrels a day (it would take a decade to get this gain). That would mean that we would be very lucky to reduce dependence of foreign oil by even 20 percent.
Given the reality, the correct response of a real reporter to a politician who wants us to have “red, white, and blue” energy by drilling everywhere is to ask him if he has any idea what he is talking about or whether he is deliberately saying things that are not true.
A real reporter does not pass along an untrue statement to listeners and compare it to a true statement and make it a “he said/she said” for listeners. Reporters have the time to evaluate the truth of statements by public officials — that is their job — listeners do not.
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