Above is a new video from the Institute for Energy Research, making the case for offshore drilling. Atlas’s senior fellow Deroy Murdock also has been making waves recently on this topic. His “Audacity of Nope” piece recently was distributed throughout the U.S. Congress via a “Dear Colleague” letter by Republican Whip Roy Blunt. The piece ran two weeks after President Bush announced his Executive Order, lifting a presidential moratorium on drilling for oil and natural gas on the Outer Continental Shelf. It is interesting to revisit quotes from that week, when oil peaked at $147 a barrel. According to The New York Times:
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said the president was “deluding the American public into believing that new offshore drilling is a quick fix to $4 per gallon gasoline.” Nothing could be further from the truth, she said.
Two months later, the price of oil is down by about $55 from that high — near $92/barrel as of yesterday. Certainly, there are many factors at work and the quick declines in the price of crude is not being immediately reflected at the pump, but no doubt there is a lesson here about how markets do anticipate future changes in supply (and demand).
On a related note (involving Hurricane Ike and gas prices in Houston), our friend Don Boudreaux has a good post on the Cafe Hayek blog, “Markets Anticipate the Future.”
I’ll close with two more plugs related to the above. If you want more material by Deroy on this topic, see also “Offshore Drilling: Cleaner Than Mother Earth” (in which he takes on another Dianne Feinstein quote). And if you want to see more video on public policy topics like the IER video at the top of this post, remember to visit AtlasNetwork.TV.
Our friend Paul Driessen has a piece on Townhall about “The Social Responsibility of Coal.” He points out that in public policy debates: “‘Corporate social responsibility’ is often defined and used by activist groups [that] want to engineer a ‘wholesale transformation’ of our energy and economic system…” Among such groups, there is little (if any) appreciation for how living standards are tied to the availability of abundant, cheap energy. Driessen discusses the topic with respect to the U.S.’s substantial coal reserves, and the rise of anti-coal agenda from the Left.
Friends of Atlas involved with the Free Minds Association in Azerbaijan and the Azeri Web site, write about “Oil Hegemony” — explaining that booming oil revenues tend to make governments less accountable. If you read Azeri, you can read the whole thing here.  In the meantime, here are a couple key quotes translated to English:
Oil has started playing its complex part in Azerbaijan’s political and economic life. It would be safe to say that oil revenues are in inverse proportion to democracy – as revenues increase, the boundaries of democracy shrink…
The adverse impact of oil is that it reduces such incentive, makes the government complacent, weakens its dependence on public opinion and enables it to be negligent to its international obligations.
I had never heard of the existence of cars that run entirely on compressed air – apparently now on the road in India via Tata Motors – until they were mentioned in an aside during a teleconference discussion of energy policy hosted by the Heartland Institute.  I gather that air-cars are only suitable for short-distance driving and that they can’t be introduced in the U.S. without changes to existing regulation on construction standards.  But what an interesting example of technological innovation being driven by entrepreneurs that want to serve a market that increasingly can’t afford to fill up on gas.   (Perhaps it will be a chapter in a future book by Terence Kealey, who gave a well-received talk at our Atlas Experience on how science tends to advance by commercial R&D, rather than commerce being advanced by publicly-funded science.)  In any case, perhaps someone with experience with an air-car can chime in in the comments sections. I’d be curious to learn more on this.
This campaign season has been pretty light on actual policy ideas.  (Today, Robert Samuelson has a piece that notes, “It is one of our fondest political myths that elections allow us collectively to settle the ‘big issues.’ The truth is that there’s often a bipartisan consensus to avoid the big issues, because they involve unpopular choices and conflicts.â€) But I am happy to point to a couple current op-ed pieces about big issues.
While much of the conversation in Washington is (rightly) focused on energy policies and what can be done to increase supply in the wake of fast-growing global demand for oil, there is another reason for rising oil prices. It is the flight from the dollar to hard assets (look at the performance of gold lately). In a piece originally published in Global Asia, Cato Institute senior fellow Steve Hanke explains the factors at work.
