RUTHFULLY YOURS

One year ago, Congress responded to the chorus of Americans calling for more American energy by lifting the ban on offshore drilling. For the first time in a quarter-century, it became legal to drill for more oil and natural gas reserves offshore. This anniversary allows us to look back on how far we have come since 2008. The sad reality is we have barely moved.

Earlier this year, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced he would delay the comment period for offshore energy exploration by six months. Salazar claimed that the previous comment period, which would have ended in March, “by no means provides enough time for public review.”

Evidently 25 years of delays and bans was not enough. During that quarter-century Congress had to make the decision each year whether to renew the ban on offshore energy, yet Salazar suggested that we were somehow engaged in a “headlong rush” to explore for energy offshore.

One reason behind this bureaucratic delay has nothing to do with developing a responsible energy policy. It has to do with the myth known as “peak oil.”

Peak oil was a theory developed decades ago that suggests we will soon reach a point of maximum oil production, after which oil will only become harder and harder to find, leading to an enormous energy crisis.

In fact, many still believe this theory today, including Al Gore, who told CNN that “we are almost certainly at or near what they call peak oil.” The Sierra Club’s executive director, Carl Pope, once warned that peak oil could come in 2010 and that “we’re better off without cheap gas.”

Since anti-energy elites ignore the massive amounts of oil that we do have but are banned from extracting, they propose new energy taxes to supposedly save us from future energy crises by punishing the use of oil. After all, if oil is the problem, then coercing America away from oil usage would be the answer.

The problem is that peak oil is fundamentally wrong.

Geophysicist Marion King Hubbert first suggested in 1956 that peak oil was a reality, and that we would hit our maximum rate of production sometime around 1970. But recent estimates of oil are actually an astounding three times larger than peak oil predictions, meaning the newest discoveries simply should not exist according to the theory of peak oil.

In Brazil, there could be as much as 100 billion barrels of oil offshore, including the Tupi oil field, which is the largest oil discovery in this hemisphere in 30 years. Had Brazilians been banned from exploring and conducting new seismic tests, they never would have made this massive discovery. Now Brazil is set to become an oil exporter.