To Drill or Not to Drill
Thursday’s Wall Street Journal displayed the strategy and bias that goes into the layout of a newspaper.
We all know that newspapers and media sources have an agenda. But rather than explicitly state its agenda in articles, the WSJ used its layout to imply one thing: we need to drill. First, the “World Economy: Oil Squeeze” page exposes the imminent problems of our major oil suppliers. The Op-Ed at the end of Section A spells out the rather controversial solution.
The first article described the inability of oil exporters to keep up with the demand of the oil thirsty world markets. It highlighted the increase in oil consumption in Saudi Arabia, the United States’ greatest supplier, by 23% to 2.3 million barrels/day since 2004. It’s expected to grow to 4.6 million by 2020. (which is bad for the US; as our demand increases, the supply from our main supplier will decrease since they’ll be consuming more of their own oil.)
Mexico, the US’s third greatest supplier, is projected to be a net oil importer (importing more oil than exporting) by 2016 if not sooner (which is bad for the US). This is according to the Energy Ministry, per the second article.
The U.K. has cut taxes on oil and natural gas fields, and has approved the development of two new North Sea oil fields, per another article on the page. (which is better than the US, since we haven’t approved the development of new oil fields since …)
While no article outrightly purports any solutions to these impending problems, if one reads on, guess what’s on page A17? The solution to our imminent problems with oil supplies! As opined in the article “Blame Congress for High Oil Prices,” the solution is to tap the significant domestic reserves of oil and gas which Congress has prohibited U.S. oil producers from doing.
Some key excerpts:
“…nonpark federal lands in the West, Alaska and under the waters off our coasts.. hold an estimated 635 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas – enough to meet the needs of the 60 million American homes fueled by natural gas for over a century. They also hold an estimated 112 billion barrels of recoverable oil – enough to produce gasoline for 60 million cars and fuel oil for 25 million homes for 60 years.”
”.. anywhere from 800 million to two trillion barrels of oil are available from oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.”
I found all of the articles compelling. While I support the need to discontinue our dependency on foreign oil supplies, and though the above arguments are quite convincing, I don’t believe shale in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, and off-coast drilling will solve our problems or bring our gas prices back down.
It seems that the WSJ editors do.
(It’s better if you see the print version. Apologies for not posting earlier..)
