The Myth About Drilling For Oil

In the current election cycle, we’ve heard from Republican candidates about how we can reduce high gasoline prices by drilling more domestic oil wells here in the US. You should know that suggestion is nothing short of campaign myth.

Refining capacity and domestic consumption aside, the price of crude oil is the single biggest factor affecting gasoline prices. As oil prices rise, gasoline prices rise, too. However, prices for crude oil are not set by a national market. As a general rule, oil produced from a well in Texas goes into the global bucket with oil from every other region in the world. Minor variations in price are based on sulfur content of the oil and transportation costs, not simply on the region from which it came. For more US drilling to change the price of oil, we would have to increase our production to a level high enough to lower the global market price (by increasing the amount of oil available in the market, therefore driving down prices). Based on oil production alone, moving gasoline prices from $5 per gallon to $2.50 per gallon would require a doubling of current global oil production.

Global oil production stands at a rate of 74 million barrels per day. In order to double global oil production, thereby reducing the cost of oil by one-half, the US would have to produce 74 million barrels of oil per day. US production, already the third largest in the world, is currently 6 million barrels per day. Moving the global market price low enough to drop oil prices to half the current price would require the US to raise its production by 12 times its current rate. The US currently has about 530,000 oil wells in production. Increasing production levels to twelve times the current rate would require more than 6 million new wells. Even if the US had the reserves to exploit, drilling that many new wells would be physically impossible.

Merely meeting US demand with US oil, a presupposition behind the call for additional drilling, would be equally impossible and do little to affect the price of oil. Currently, the US consumes about 19 million barrels of oil per day. With production at 6 million barrels per day, the US would have to triple domestic production in order to meet current demand. That alone would require the addition of a million new wells and would still not insulate US consumers from the effect of global oil prices. Simply producing as much oil as we consume would yield no market dynamic that would force oil companies to sell their oil at prices below that fixed by the global market.

Will Republicans Sell Their Soul To Win An Election

The 2010 Midterm Election saw the Republican/Tea Party Alliance take control of the House of Representatives. Had they offered more credible candidates in several key Senate races, they may well have taken control of Congress. That said, the party faces a serious dilemma as it looks ahead to the 2012 presidential race.

As I outlined in my earlier post (Midterm Elections Show Republican Party in Crisis, see below), the Tea Party has brought fresh energy to the Republican effort. Credible Tea Party candidates did well, and their supporters voted. Their grassroots effort created a block of voters through which any successful Republican Party presidential candidate will have to pass. And that block is strongly motivated by opposition to President Obama, a fact reflected by the similarity between Obama’s Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll disapproval rating – 41% (http://tiny.cc/dwxcn) and the number of voters in 2010 House elections who identified themselves as Tea Party supporters – 41%.

A Republican/Tea Party presidential candidate, holding Tea Party policy positions, could expect to receive the support of everyone to the right of those positions – immigration reform, lower taxes, curb federal spending, repeal of recent healthcare changes. Those issues worked well in the House races which targeted individual candidates and compartmentalized voter choices. To get to the presidency, a Republican/Tea Party candidate would have to appeal to voters closer to the center. Not many issues offer the option of a move to the left of Tea Party positions. One possibility might be abortion.

Once the decisive issue among Evangelical Christian voters, opposition to abortion has faded as a motivating factor for the way Christians view and decide political issues. For instance, in opposing healthcare reform, only 3% of those polled said they opposed it because of the possibility of increased funding for abortion (Pew Forum http://tiny.cc/x8by5). Most said they opposed it because of the cost and increased government intrusion on their lives.

Opposition to abortion is not the primary motivating factor among Tea Party faithful. Their motivation comes from strong, deep-seated opposition to Barack Obama and is expressed through economic issues. Blue-blood Republicans, another faction of the Republican coalition, have longed for a day when they could jettison the Christian right. Now, they might have that opportunity.

A pro-choice Republican candidate, with genuine pro-choice credentials, running on a platform that stresses economic and personal liberty issues, would open the Party’s appeal to progressive voters nearer the center of political opinion. Evangelical Christians would be forced to decide between not voting, and handing the election to President Obama, or voting for a pro-choice Republican based on other issues. It’s a strategy that just might win.

Which leaves the Republican/Tea Party alliance, and Evangelical Christians, facing an interesting question: Will you sell your soul for the sake of opposing Barack Obama?

Midterm Election Results Show Republican Party In Crisis

According to 2010 Midterm Election exit polls, 41% of those voting in House elections favored the Tea Party. 31% opposed it. 25% had no response. Overall, 53% opposed the Republican Party – yet the Republican Party won control of the House of Representatives. Traditional Republicans see this election as a referendum on the Obama administration and a mandate to undo many of the things that have been done in the past two years. Tea Party leaders see the election results as placing them in the driver’s seat for the presidential election in 2012. Actually, the 2010 Midterm Elections revealed a political party in transition and crisis.

In this election, Tea Party candidates ran as Republicans and were a big part of the Republican success in taking control of the House. But they did not run with impunity. Credible Tea Party candidates did well, but most of their candidates lost – many of them because of a lack of credibility. Yet, with 41% of voters identifying themselves as Tea Party supporters, the Tea Party has emerged as the source of energy in the Republican Party.

For the past thirty years, the Republican Party found its strength in a coalition of traditional conservatives and evangelical Christians. Those groups were bound together by hot-button issues like abortion, national defense, and lower taxes. Now, that coalition is changing and the emerging Republican alliance is an uneasy one – a fact revealed in the poll results showing 53% of voters identified themselves as opposing the Republican Party, even though a significant number of that opposition voted for Republican candidates.

The Tea Party tapped into voter anger over the direction of the economy, immigration, same-sex marriage, and a general distrust and dislike of President Obama. Fueled by that anger, the Tea Party turned to the familiar tactic of street protests to build support for its positions. (They called their gatherings ‘rallies’ instead of ‘marches’ but they served the same function just as well). Though somewhat ill-defined, the Tea Party has loosely coalesced around several charismatic spokesmen – Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, and Rush Limbaugh among them. They offered a hard-line, uncompromising, decidedly conservative message that energized supporters to hold local rallies, work for approved candidates, and vote.

As a result, the coalition under the Republican umbrella has now become a Tea Party-Traditional Conservative-Evangelical Christian coalition. However, the galvanizing issues for that coalition are no longer opposition to abortion, lower taxes, or military support, but opposition to President Obama and the undoing of measures passed during the first two years of his administration. This shift in motivation gave the Republican/Tea Party success in the midterm elections, but it puts them in a precarious position for 2012.

Assuming 2010 voter patterns hold in the 2012 election, any presidential candidate hoping to win from the Republican Party will have to do so with Tea Party approval. The Republican candidate will be a Tea Party candidate. That gets the Republicans a theoretical 41% of the vote, which leaves them 10% shy of victory. To attain a majority, the Republican/Tea Party candidate would have to appeal to half of the 21% who identified themselves as having no position for or against the Tea Party or the Republicans – essentially, undecided voters. Assuming the Tea Party’s 41% support lies to the right of center, a Republican/Tea Party presidential candidate would have to find motivating issues through which he or she could appeal to those slightly to the left of current Tea Party policy – without alienating supporters on the extreme right. Very few issues offer the potential for even a slight shift to the center and none of the potential candidates who have appeared so far seems capable of accomplishing the task. Getting from 41% to 51% will be a monumental task for the tenuous Republican/Tea Party alliance, one that will require a candidate who has yet to step forward.

The End of Dual Citizenship

For perhaps the first two hundred years of our American republic, Christians had the luxury of holding dual citizenship. Christians arguably could maintain a commitment to the Kingdom of God and the United States without jeopardizing their allegiance to the former by their allegiance to the later. That is no longer true.

When Christians in America turn to the question of civic involvement, they are faced with only two realistic choices. On the one hand, they can express their political interest by supporting candidates of the Democrat Party, a party that not only supports the right to abortion-on-demand, but which seeks to use government to promote that practice. Those not satisfied with that option can express their civic opinions through the Republican/Tea Party, which still has a pro-life stance but has adopted a Darwinian economic policy that damns the poor to a miserable existence for the sake of the wealthy, and a Draconian immigration policy fueled by racial hatred and division. The options posed by both parties place Christians at odds with Scripture.

In the end, religion has become merely one more tool by which politicians motivate their electoral base. And though that effort may have influenced the outcome of elections, it has done little to influence government policy. All the while, the church has grown more and more like secular society, reflecting the same rates for premarital sex, infidelity, divorce, and preoccupation with wealth.

Jesus wasn't kidding when he said, “You cannot serve two masters.”

Capitalism's Forgotten Moral Responsibility

Communists forgot that economies rest on individual choices. Forgetting that one simple truth left Communism relegated to the trash pile of socioeconomic theories.

In the United States, Capitalists gloated over Communism’s demise and spent the last two decades touting the power of individual choice and the wonders of economic freedom. And along the way, the Capitalists became forgetful, too.

Capitalism’s advocates have forgotten that no individual choice stands alone but rather stands in relationship to every other choice by every other person. Taken together, the individual choices that drive economies form communities. The freedom to attain wealth of immeasurable portion carries with it the moral obligation to address the needs of those who cannot succeed in a system in which success is the product of competition. At its heart, Capitalism produces great wealth, but it also produces an inherent economic disparity between those who thrive on competition and those who don’t.

The American economy moves on two trends. On one track, the trend is toward greater and greater efficiency, empowerment, and access. Yet the same things that promote those qualities – technology, information, and complexity – take the economy on a second trend toward exclusion of those with less skill, less ability, and limited access to education. The kind of Darwinian Capitalism promoted today would see no problem with grinding up those who cannot or will not pull themselves up to the required level of competition. That lack of moral imperative will be the end of our capitalist system.

In the 19th Century, pro-slavery advocates used state sovereignty arguments in an attempt to defend the immoral practice of slavery, and sacrificed the Tenth Amendment doing so. Segregationists of the 20th Century used a similar argument to defend the equally immoral American Apartheid, and sacrificed what remained of state sovereignty in that effort. Now, Darwinian Capitalists are sacrificing the remains of American Capitalism to defend their devotion to materialism. Capitalism can rouse itself to remember its moral obligation, or it can die. The liberty that grants to some the means of attaining great wealth comes at the price of caring for those who cannot, for whatever reason, exercise that liberty.