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Obama Blocks Offshore Drilling In Atlantic, Arctic Areas (npr.org)
Before the new administration takes over next month, President Obama took new action Wednesday to place large sections of the Arctic and the Atlantic Oceans off limits to oil drilling. NPR reports: The Arctic protections are a joint partnership with Canada. "These actions, and Canada's parallel actions, protect a sensitive and unique ecosystem that is unlike any other region on earth," the White House said in a statement. "They reflect the scientific assessment that, even with the high safety standards that both our countries have put in place, the risks of an oil spill in this region are significant and our ability to clean up from a spill in the region's harsh conditions is limited," the White House added. "By contrast, it would take decades to fully develop the production infrastructure necessary for any large-scale oil and gas leasing production in the region -- at a time when we need to continue to move decisively away from fossil fuels." Obama's action designates 31 Atlantic canyons "off limits to oil and gas exploration and development activity," totaling 3.8 million acres, according to the administration. It provides the same protections to much of the Arctic's waters, covering the "vast majority of U.S. waters in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas," totaling 115 million acres. Canada is doing the same to "all Arctic Canadian waters," the joint statement adds. Obama took these actions by invoking a law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which gives the president the authority to withdraw lands from oil and gas leases.
Why didn't he bother doing this before now?
FYI, it costs $150 to drill, process, and ship a barrel of oil from the Arctic. If you want to cover costs. Labor isn't cheap either.
So, putting it off for at least five years makes sense. Increases short term price for all oil, which helps Norway, Scotland, Canada, and the US (and that rogue state Russia), and when the time elapses the demand may be at prices where it makes sense, if we need it for lubricants or some other need.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
can we maybe slow down our use for business reasons? I'd rather have moderate-speed sustainable growth, at slightly higher fuel prices that help drive commercial advances in solar and wind, than find out in fifty years that we've drilled out all the easy-to-get wells and don't have nearly enough commercial investment in other fuel sources to keep up our demand for energy.
Besides, petroleum has some pretty nifty properties besides energy production that I'd really love to keep having easy access to. Like, cheap plastics. Burning it for energy is kinda like using our limited helium reserves for toy balloons.
I don't think there's going to be any kind of peak oil civilization-ending disaster...just that prices will go up. But if they go up a little right now, they won't have to go up by a lot later.
Oh yeah...and from a foreign policy standpoint. We have a ton of oil here in the USA. Energy independence is nice, but it's not critical right now. Wait until Russia closes its borders, the Middle East falls apart and turns off their spigots, and Europe is begging for fuel at any price...can we maybe use our massive national reserves then instead of now? (needing to have the infrastructure in place ahead of time does complicate things I'll admit)
Honest question. Do you actually believe that more than 90% of climatologists have somehow been bribed to lie?
If "yes", wouldn't "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" imply that one should find clear evidence of mass bribery before dismissing the climatologists' conclusions?
It would also mean that within a typical sample of scientist, that 90%+ are bribe-able. I also find that an extraordinary claim. It's never before happened on any other topic.
Table-ized A.I.
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. . . China is building yet even more artificial military base islands in the Arctic waters, to add more weight to their claim that the Arctic is part of China's territorial waters. This claim is not recognized by any other nations . . . yet.
The Chinese navy also announced that they have captured a US Navy drone in their waters. It is very large and coated with a blubbery black skin, that is probably "stealth" technology. The drone appears to be armed with a water jet weapon, that sporadically spews from the top of the drone. It is powered by bottom dwelling sea crustacean critters that it scoops up with a toothed dredging device at the front of the drone. Chinese scientists plan to disassemble the drone to discover how the crustacean critters are converted into energy.
Chinese navy crew members have claimed to have seen a "white" version of the drone, but the Chinese Admiralty brushes this off as sailors who have been out to sea too long, with too much rice wine, and too little women folk around.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
... Congress can take away.
Obama has the authority to declare land off limits "permanently" only because Congress granted that authority. This authority can be revoked by a future Congress. Both houses of Congress will be controlled by the Republicans so I expect this "permanent" executive order to go away right quick.
What bothers me about the Democrats fanatical desire to free us from oil and coal seems to come with more words than actions. Obama only now made this declaration, only days before he is to leave office. If CAGW is a real problem then I'd think this should have been done much sooner.
We see the same with nuclear power. Obama during his debates with McCain talked about how we need to see more research and development in nuclear power to lower CO2 output. It took the Obama administration only 7 years to figure out how to issue a combined construction and operation license even though there were dozens of applicants. Don't tell me all of those applicants didn't know how to build a safe nuclear power plant. The federal government knows how to build safe nuclear power plants, they've been doing that for decades for the Navy. If the problem was a bad design, and the federal government thought nuclear power was a good idea, then the federal government had the ability to give the nuclear power industry all they needed to know on how to comply with the safety regulations in place.
What a bunch of hypocrites, they talk big about reducing CO2 output but they hold up nuclear power reactors, don't ban off shore drilling until now, what was stopping them for so long? Makes me think that CAGW is in fact a hoax. If the Democrats believed that nuclear power is a good idea, and drilling for oil is a bad idea, then they'd have made these fixes when they held the Senate, House, and Presidency.
Only when they see that the Republicans could possibly replace them all in the federal government do they do a dash to issue nuclear power licenses, and bar drilling for oil. Makes me think that they wanted to hold on to as many "fixes" for CAGW as long as they could, holding them up as "prizes" for the voting public to hand out for voting them into office, and then blame any thing holding up their fix on CAGW on the "evil" Republicans. Well, there were no Republicans to stop anything when the 112th Congress was in session. We should have seen those nuclear power plants and drilling bans then.
The Democrats have only themselves to blame for losing so badly in November.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
How is this any less reasonable than Obama's actual actions?
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That's because people are short sighted. When oil prices were skyrocketing, people wanted to open ANWR, but the democratic response was that it wouldn't help because it'd take 10 years before it started producing, given not just the drilling but building a pipeline for it. My thoughts were exactly this: we were debating this freaking 10 years ago. If they'd moved then, it would have been done by now and we wouldn't be having this "crisis."
Don't get me wrong - I would like to spend resources on alternatives, too, but the demand for oil is not going to go away for some time.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Did you know, every time you exhale, you increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is adding to global climate change and the decimation of the planet?
Nonsense. Unless you're consuming food obtained from far under the ground, where it was out of the carbon cycle, your net contribution to the CO2 in the atmosphere is zero. The food you eat contains carbon that was removed from the atmosphere. Now, your methane production is a somewhat different situation. It's also constructed of carbon and hydrogen that's part of the cycle, but you've converted it to a form that's a much more effective greenhouse gas than before you, er, processed it.
So, kindly recast your argument in terms of the rational value of allowing people to fart.
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You demonstrate the reason why Obama did this.
Protecting nature is stupid?
There is "protecting nature" and "protecting nature." Did you know, every time you exhale, you increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is adding to global climate change and the decimation of the planet?
No. Because the carbon we exhale originally comes from plants and is already in the carbon cycle. If your breathing exhaled twice as much carbon it wouldn't add to carbon in the atmosphere because you'd need to compensate by taking in twice as much carbon from plants.
The former is what Obama has just done, with an expectation that anyone who dares suggest it is stupid to do it that way will have people claiming that there is no other way to "protect nature". Thus the obvious goal of anyone who rejects the extremist method of "do nothing at all that might ever have accidental negative consequences that can be fixed" being attacked for wanting to "destroy nature". This makes the issue a political football instead of a reasoned response to scientific and technological concerns.
The scientific and technological concern is that it's extremely difficult to clean up oil spills and they are extremely harmful to the environment, particularly in the Arctic.
In this scenario the economic benefits don't outweigh the environmental costs (from both increased carbon and oil spills). The reason oil companies still want to drill is they're not liable for the full cost of the environmental damage in the event of an accident. We are.
This is the game that was played with waterboarding, as an example. Those who didn't approve of torture but didn't think waterboarding was torture were accused of approving of torture because "obviously" waterboarding IS torture and thus approving of waterboarding was approving of torture in general. It makes for wonderful rants and great political grandstanding, but sheds very little light on the issue.
Waterboarding is inflicting pain and extreme discomfort for the purpose of breaking the prisoner's will and extracting information. Of course it's torture. The US has executed war criminals for waterboarding on the grounds that it is torture.
Are there more brutal and bloody forms of torture? Sure.
But waterboarding is torture.
I stole this Sig
No evidence for a scientific consensus on climate change? How about this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this?
There's zero need for additional drilling in Arctic.
Can you say with any certainty this will remain true in the next five to ten years it would take before any drilling started now would start producing? I don't believe you can.
We will be burning oil in significant quantities for at least the next 30 years. How can I say this? Because the average lifespan of a container ship, passenger jet, train, and so many other consumers of fossil fuels last about 30 years. People keep their cars for an average of about ten years, which means many of the cars sold today will quite likely still be driven 20 years from now.
The only thing that can shift us off of fossil fuels is some huge technological development that makes fossil fuels obsolete.
Electric cars won't do it, the rules of physics are against it. Wind and solar? Not a chance. Bio-fuels? Sure, if you want to see a real environmental disaster. Hydrogen? Methanol? Ammonia? Those aren't energy sources, only storage and transport technologies. Nuclear power? Now, that might work.
We can't pour nuclear power into a fuel tank to fly a plane or drive a car but we can use nuclear power to make synthetic hydrocarbons, hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, or whatever makes a good replacement for crude oil derived fuels. It's not like there's a shortage of nuclear fuel. If we can make it safe enough for Navy submarines then we can make it safe enough for putting just about any where else. Even if "anywhere else" means building nuclear reactors in submersible containers so they are insulated from earthquakes, surrounded by coolant, protected from terrorism, shielded from emitting any radiation, and out of sight.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.