What works?

By Published by The Editorial Board

Published: June 23, 2008

Rising gas prices have gouged family budgets, lowered the value of SUVs and trucks and made groceries more expensive.

As prices have increased, the greens are being beaten black and blue by those who think environmental concerns have stopped oil and gas exploration off our coasts and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

While there may be vast amounts of untapped oil and natural gas that is now off limits because of environmental worries, it’s hard to imagine many Americans wanting to vacation at a beach located near an oil drilling platform.

For that matter, environmentalists never told anybody to buy a car that gets 15 miles per gallon. Environmentalists also didn’t push China and India to spark a global increase in demand for energy that has pushed up prices for oil and gas.

Green concerns have played a role in thwarting domestic oil and gas production, but a lot of other things are contributing to today’s higher prices. We’re in a deep, hole, and we can’t scapegoat or conserve or even drill our way out of it.

Drilling our way out of the problem won’t work because the global demand for energy has increased — and because of a phenomenon called “peak oil.”

There is a finite amount of available fossil fuels and even if we find more in Alaska or off our coast, it will eventually run out. No one knows for sure when that will happen, but some energy experts believe we have reached the point where the world has already used the easy-to-find and retrieve petroleum. They call the problem peak oil.

Even people who don’t believe the global warming argument for turning away from fossil fuels can’t ignore the reality of peak oil.

The energy problems we have today can’t be fixed overnight. It took a long time to create the conditions for $4 per gallon gas in the United States. The only real solutions are long term, leaving everyone to suffer through the much more expensive short term. But if we don’t start to work on long term solutions now, our future will only be much, much worse.

Drilling for oil and gas off our coasts and in Alaska can take years and cost billions of dollars — and it won’t lower pump prices anytime soon.

But after this nation decides on a plan to fully develop one or more of the underutilized alternative energy sources — solar, wind, tidal, biofuels, nuclear and geothermal — then drilling for oil and gas off our coasts and in Alaska makes sense as a mid-term solution.

If America can put a man on the moon, it can find a 21st century way to power its future. Drilling for American oil and gas only makes sense as part of a much larger strategy to make this an energy independent nation.