First, a few qualifiers. I believe that the whole earth is the Lord's and that He has charged mankind with the care of it. I believe this means to be good stewards, use wisdom, and to be careful with our resources. I do not have a problem with anyone doing any of those things. I do have a problem with environmentalism as a movement.
It starts today with gas prices. Why are gas prices so high? One of our biggest problems, I believe, is a dependence on oil from the Middle East. We have billions and billions of tons of oil and natural gas sitting under our very own country and yet we allow OPEC to have a virtual monopoly on the oil industry.
How does this happen? Let's take drilling on the North Slope of Alaska. The oil companies gave one of my former geology professors a $1 million grant to hike through the North Slope and do geologic mapping. He took those same maps back to our Structural Geology class for us to look for oil plumes. There were lots of them and they were huge. The oil is there.
But we're not drilling. Why is that? The oil and gas industry is one of the most (if not THE most) highly subsidized industries in our country. They do spend money on exploration and they find lots of oil, but they don't drill. The reason is because our government gives them money not to. This is just like subsidies for farmers not to grow corn, or wheat, or whatever.
The resulting scarcity of oil leads to high prices--a cost at the pump, say $2.99/gallon would likely be less than half of that without subsidies. It also leads to a dependence on foreign oil, like from the Middle East. When those regions are unstable (has the Middle East ever been stable?) it drives the prices even higher--then ludicrously high. So why do we subsidize oil companies? Aside from conspiracy theories, I'm not really sure. The best guess I have is that it makes for rich oil companies. And rich oil companies are usually stable oil companies.
Now, to why I am not an environmentalist. As a movement, environmentalists look to the problem of high gas prices and demand that our government invest more in alternative energy resources. Remember, this is the same government that is already paying the oil companies NOT to drill for more oil! Now they should finance both the oil industry and the alternative energy industry? By the way, I am not against alternative energy. People have been using windmills and waterwheels for centuries, so I'm not exactly sure that "alternative" is the best word to describe it. These things are great and with a little money, some ingenuity, and some smarts some clever people could make a lot of money--and we will never run out of energy.
Why don't the environmentalists want to drill for more oil? They want to finance the alternative energy industry because they believe in human-induced global warming. Again, when I was a geology student, around 7 years ago, global climate change was talked about in most of our classes. It is a difficult issue to discuss scientifically because of the scarcity of data. We have only been taking global temperatures for the last 80 years or so. This is hardly enough to show an overall trend. The last several years (10-15) have been significantly warmer than usual, but most of my professors would refuse to say what the cause of that was.
I did attend a talk by a climatologist who had studied fossilized coral from the bottom of the oceans. Coral grow at different rates based on the temperature of the oceans. Therefore, you should be able to track global temperatures based on fossilized coral from around the world. He had traced estimated global temperatures (these are indirectly arrived at) back to the 14th century, and the temperatures then showed a high spike in temperature, very similar to what we are experiencing now. There were no cars in the 14th century.
Now, to our conclusion. Our high gas prices are a multiple result of our dependence on foreign oil, gas subsidies, and a push for alternative fuels. The easiest solution--build more refineries, drill for oil--is passed over by those who believe that this is our opportunity to start driving wind-propelled cars (which is not a bad idea, by the way). However, to ask the government to finance the industry (which they already are), when they're also financing the oil and gas industry is a waste of their time and all of our money.
THE END.
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