The U.S. Is about to Be the World’s Top Crude Oil Producer. Guess Who Didn’t See It Coming.
by Charles Lane (Washington Post) … Domestic crude production was not inherently “limited,” as O’Connell told Congress in 2011, it just needed a better mouse trap. Fracking was it. Entrepreneurs broke the oil-import addiction, even though the main thing they intended to do was get rich.
The government policies — mandatory ethanol use in motor fuels; higher gas-mileage standards for cars — established in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which a Democratic Congress passed, the Republican Bush signed, and most Americans soon forgot, played a far smaller role.
This in no way changes the fact that fossil-fuel consumption poses serious risks to the environment, but that is a separate issue, which advocates have often combined with energy security for political reasons. Henceforth, environmentalists should make the case for reducing fossil-fuel use on its own green merits, rather than in tough-guy national-security terms.
That case can, indeed, be made, but the strongest version involves higher fuel taxes and other direct incentives to conserve, not wasteful subsidies to government-selected producers such as Tesla, or Iowa’s corn ethanol agro-industrial complex. READ MORE
Robert J. Samuelson: Why fossil fuels survive (Washington Post)
