* Hemp (“for victory” over the Middle Easterners and Chavez) is just a dream.

(In fact, wind towers can be erected on farm lands, too.)

* * *

And don't forget the coal!

http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1996/of96-092/other_fil…

I'll be nice, Chris, and not address (yet?) the federal lockup of so much land in the West (how colonial of Washington to do that as well as to draw such arbitrary straight-line boundaries like the Europeans did in Asia and Africa), or the opening of so much of that land to l o g g i n g .

I'm not a big fan of wind farms but in boring terrain or as opposed to just looking at water, the wind farms are literally of passing interest when I travel by them.

http://rredc.nrel.gov/wind/pubs/atlas/maps/chap…

http://rredc.nrel.gov/wind/pubs/atlas/maps/chap…

Just open the top fields to development.

[BIG file]

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/rpd/topfields.pdf

Oil industry — educational. Bible Belt — hope you handled it okay.

“But in the end it's not a proven resource until the exploratory well is drilled and successful.”

Some of our existing sites (lease sites) and such are tricky.

http://www.aapg.org/explorer/2005/11nov/pacific…

That is another reason why the the other sites should not be locked up, which makes no sense.

Oh, and Chris — many of us don't object to wind farms offshore along with oil rigs? Even though to many the wind farms are much worse of an eyesore or form of visual pollution. The real issue with these things (what matters the most) is the hazard they present to shipping.

It's a shame we don't have development offshore already. That, and Monterey Bay developed so much as to rival San Diego and constitute a #4 national-class major metro area complete with world-class shipping port and channel over the undersea canyon…but that's California and its “Massachusetts Lite” dysfunctional nonsense for you. Liquefied natural gas plants need to be situated next door in Mexico due to the nonsense.

I lived in Tulsa for five years. For most of that time my wife was an executive assistant in a mid-size oil company. For two years of it I worked in the office of a small oil company, which means knowing the owners, the geologists and everyone else involved. The low level folks like us get to see and hear almost everything in businesses like that. I am not ignorant of the business in general though neither of the companies we worked for were involved in offshore work. There's some amazing technology helping find oil nowadays. But in the end it's not a proven resource until the exploratory well is drilled and successful.

Yes, or to put it more bluntly, there are crooks in this world. (As well as just plain greedy people — and of course Adam Smith's “conspiracy to raise prices” remark is well-grounded.)

Leaving aside the real-world critique of libertarianism (as it applies to minimalist government and regulation) that it's not only flirting with anarchism and is “atomistic” but (in this thread's context) it effectively is the “honor system,” but people cheat — in addition to that, the ideal economic situation consists of innumerable sellers as well as buyers with equal power in the market, but that's often not the way the real world happens to be.

Global warming-related political-economic policy goals are almost total BS. Real air pollution is what we should be concerned about, as well as the reality of what alternatives are economical and practical (not politically or merely emotionally appealing). Burning hydrocarbons completely (i.e., perfectly) yields carbon dioxide and water, nothing else. THAT IS WHAT ALL INTELLIGENT, MORAL, PHILOSOPHICALLY ADVANCED PEOPLE REALIZE IS THE IDEAL AND WHAT IS DESIREABLE AND PREFERRED, not undesireable. What then is open to consideration is substitution of some other energy source for the combustion of hydrocarbons (leaving them free for other uses, such as in industry and in chemistry.

For electricity production, we have coal, nuclear, hydropower, and oil and gas combustion. Typically we switch from coal or oil to gas when air pollution needs to be reduced, or we provide gas combustion for peak load (leaving coal as the source for base load). Solar may be great on hot summer afternoons for peak load (the logic behind this all but shouts at people), but solar and wind are not nation-wide replacements for base load. The obvious replacement for coal is nuclear, because hydropower isn't viable everywhere (and hydropower has a far worse environmental effect than nuclear, which has the smallest of all, solar, wind, biomass included). However, the hypocritical activists are mindlessly anti-nuclear. So what you see is contined construction of new coal-fired plants, because coal is so cheap. The alternatives do not make economic sense.

With transportation, it's all about oil-based fuels. Any alternative must not cost much more and needs comparable energy density. (No, we do not “have” [sic] to “subtantially reconsider and consequently reduce our expectations and standards of vehicle performance.”)

With space heating, it's mainly gas (and we need to develop our gas fields as well as import more liquefied natural gas and defy the NIMBYs and environmentalist anti-progress kooks and build more LNG facilities) with heating oil in the Northeast and a few other old places; electricity used for space heating is uneconomic as a rule except where you have really cheap power such as in the Northwest with big hydropower availablility.

Actually, there's an enormous real-world lesson as well as paradox in that that liberals need to learn when it comes to both regulation and the “revolving door” government-industry phenomenon. Those who know the industry best and are in the best position to make all kinds of decisions about the industry are members of the industry themselves. Nobody else knows the industry better. This is true for all industries.

The Democrats have exploited stupidity for decades. Obama is doing a great job of it now with his sound-bite appearances, though if you are able to dig into his background such as by reading the recent New York article about him you'll have more, not less, respect for him after doing so.

Chris — the alternatives have to be practical and realistic, too.

A rational short-term approach to high demand and low supply with oil is to speed up research and development of conversion of coal to other fuels (not only using it to fuel boilers for electricity production but to convert it to transportation fuels, where so much oil is used without any real substitute any time soon).

Then of course when it comes to alternatives to coal for electricity production, the obvious replacement is nuclear. Hydropower is also a non-air-polluting alternative, but nearly all the really good, big sites have been exploited already.

Everyone else has a say, too. It' snot just the residents' coastline (or interior sites) and I am not worried about environmental-accident alarmism.

Now you are onto something legally insofar as what is the object of federal versus state jurisdiction offshore. Will liberals rediscover federalism?

* * *

“I've heard that oil is running out for about 40 years now—-just like I heard about global cooling in the seventies.”

In some cases, the latter was brought to you (with the same “solutions”) by the same folks who lead the global warming fad now — along with those who probably don't want you to know about it such as “libertarian” Lowell Ponte, author of “The Cooling.”

Economic oil is going to run out eventually, though the process will be slow-motion and braked as more expensive sources become viable the higher prices go.

As it is, we should end the arbitrary, stupid political lockups offshore and on our continent and open everything to drilling. Lockup is pathological.

Because if your guesses are wrong about oil, then we're f*cked. But if we diversify our energy supplies and you're right, then we'll at least have cleaner sources of fuel, we'll be sending less money to the Middle East, etc…

I've heard that oil is running out for about 40 years now—-just like I heard about global cooling in the seventies. Ain't gonna happen for a long while yet, & better exploration & extraction techniques mean that instead of 30% of the oil in existing fields, over 70% will be profitably extracted. Read Oil & Gas Journal, not the Sierra Club, to find out what is happening in oil E&P.

Are you against finding alternative fuels and energy?

For the record, the problem is not going to be that we're going to run out of oil. The problem is that at some point oil will become too expensive to get out of the ground. If we don't prepare for that, our economy will crumble. Apparently the rightwingers are okay with that. No wonder they don't care about the Bush recession.

I was International Editor of The Oil Daily for a while & the problem with oil offshore drilling is not the oil companies, but govt. imbecility like the Clinton veto of ANWR in '96. The Dems are trying to drive up oil prices & blame it on the oil companies, period.

Keep on with your delusional ravings.