Offshore Drilling vs. Global Warming
By John Tierney
Are environmentalists doing themselves — or the environment — any favor by denying states the right to decide whether there should be oil drilling off their shores?
My colleague Andy Revkin notes an interesting argument by Peter Maass in favor of offshore drilling here: better to do it under the strict environmental controls of America than to “outsource” the job to places like Nigeria. I’d like to look at it from a different perspective: How is this fight about offshore oil going to affect efforts to control greenhouse emissions?
If environmentalists and their allies (like Senator Barack Obama) prevail over those who want to drill (like President Bush and Senator John McCain), there would be a little less oil on the world market, which would keep prices a little higher and thereby discourage consumption. That would mean fewer greenhouse emissions. But this would be a minor effect, and it has to be balanced against the longterm damage to environmentalists’ cause. Aside from being distraction from the serious new danger of global warming, the fight over offshore drilling makes them vulnerable to the old charge that they prefer hype to science.
Offshore drilling has made a photogenic enemy for environmentalists since the famous spill off Santa Barbara in 1969, but its risks have been greatly exaggerated. During the debate over allowing offshore drilling in 1984, the Times editorialized in support of the drilling and offered this response to the opponents:
Why risk populated or ecologically fragile coasts, they say, when oil is available elsewhere? There surely is some risk of damage. But the technology of containing spills and vigor of regulation have come a long way since Santa Barbara. No serious spill has marred the harvesting of four billion barrels from 12,000 drilling rigs in American waters since 1970. Statistically, tankers bearing imported oil now pose a much greater environmental danger.
Since then the risks have shrunk further. A 2003 report from the National Research Council noted that only 1 percent of oil that entered U.S. waters during the 1990s came from extraction operations (like the offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico). Even if you combined that amount with the oil spilled by tankers, it amounted to only 3 percent of the total — and only 1/20th as much oil as entered the water through natural seepage from the ocean floor.
[ books.nap.edu ]
Of course, an oil spill concentrated in one spot can harm the local environment, but banning offshore drilling doesn’t lessen the risk of big oil spills — it simply makes it more likely there’ll be a spill from a foreign tanker. In 1989, when Congress moved to ban drilling off the New Jersey coast, this ban was criticized by Lawrence Schmidt of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection:
I think what’s happening in Congress right now is a knee-jerk reaction to oil spills from tankers. The risks of an accident from a tanker carrying in either foreign crude or refined petroleum are many, many times greater than the risk of an oil spill from an offshore exploration or production platform.
In any case, since this kind of oil is mainly a local problem, what’s wrong with letting the locals decide if they want to take the risk? Even if the federal ban is lifted, states would still have the right to forbid drilling off their coasts, and many have already promised to do just that.
Environmentalists made good arguments for states’ rights when they fought against corporations and the federal government to allow state regulation of the greenhouse emissions from cars. But if states are competent enough to set their own policies on something as complex as global warming, why can’t they decide if drilling rigs should be allowed to operate off their shores?
tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com
''The risks of an accident from a tanker carrying in either foreign crude or refined petroleum are many, many times greater than the risk of an oil spill from an offshore exploration or production platform.''
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