October 31, 2013
The dot-com
implosion. Thousands butchered on 9/11. Quagmire in Afghanistan. The expensive, bloody,
and wholly
unnecessary invasion of Iraq.
The nastiest recession since the Great Depression. No progress on family
fragmentation and the social pathologies
it spawns. The
worst presidential duo since Johnson and Nixon. A tripling of the
national debt. The decades-long campaign against a once-functioning healthcare marketplace
performs its coup
de grâce.
America is having a horrible 21st century. Isn’t
it time for some good news?
Here’s what
could be the only item on the solace side: energy. But the blessing isn’t a long-overdue
arrival of the “renewables” so cherished by the nation’s ignorant elites.
Energy isn’t being revolutionized by wind turbines, solar panels, and hydrogen-powered fuel
cells -- its new reality is dawning through abundant petroleum and natural
gas.
Between August
2008 and August 2013, production
of crude soared from 5 million to 7.5 million barrels per day. That’s up 50
percent in five years, a pace that the PIRA Energy Group recently concluded was
“greater than the sum of the growth of the next nine fastest growing countries
combined and … covered most of the world’s net demand growth over the past two
years.” Amazingly, sometime in the near future, the U.S.-Canadian economy will
produce all the transportation fuels it
consumes.
Production
growth has been impressive for natural gas, too. It was
28.6 percent between July 2005 and July 2013. The Associated Press reported
that a single formation, the Pennsylvania-centered Marcellus,
“now produces more natural gas than Saudi Arabia, and that glut has led to
wholesale prices here that are about one-quarter of those in Japan.” The U.S.
will soon be an impressive natural-gas
exporter.
“Fracking,”
maligned by brainless busybodies such as Yoko Ono, Mark Ruffalo, and Susan Sarandon, is
undergirding the American economy. The far-left Progressive Policy Institute’s “Investment
Heroes” report tracks the nonfinancial companies that make the most capital
expenditures domestically. In 2012, six corporations in the oil-and-gas sector --
ExxonMobil, Chevron, Occidental, ConocoPhillips, Hess, and Enterprise Products
Partners -- made the list, investing $36.3 billion. The same six reappeared in
the 2013 edition, this time spending $44.9 billion. The hydrocarbon giants
increased their share of the top 25 “hero” firms’ total investment from 26.7
percent to 30 percent.
Hydrocarbon-extraction
employment is, quite understandably,
surging. The Great Recession’s job trough bottomed out in February 2010. Since
then, national employment has grown by a subpar 5.4 percent -- so unimpressive
that the country has yet to reattain its January 2008 peak of 138.1 million
jobs. By contrast, work in the oil-and-gas industry has risen by 26 percent
since February 2010. It is more than 40,000 positions above its level of January 2008.
“If you can
pass a drug test and get a commercial driver’s license, you can get $80,000 in
one phone call,” a Texas
banker, referring to opportunities in the Eagle Ford, told Bloomberg
in March. Earlier this month the Pittsburgh
Business Times noted a Raymond James finding that “between 2005 and 2012
almost 90 percent of the job growth in Pennsylvania
… came from oil and gas jobs in the upstream and midstream.”
Fuels
produced, investments made, job offers extended -- it’s all good. But the most
enjoyable facet of the boom has been the debunking of decades of dunderheaded,
hysterical predictions by politicians, energy bureaucrats, legacy-media
personalities, nutty professors, and eco-alarmists.
M. King Hubbert,
the Pontiff of Peak Oil, proffered his dire prognosis a half-century ago. Similar
warnings had predated the geologist’s doomsaying, but most, mercifully, went ignored.
After Hubbert, unlimited-government types, always hustling for an impending “crisis”
that requires their brilliance and leadership, hyped the resource-depletion
bogeyman. In 1977, the Federal Power Commission’s
Gordon Zareski told Congress that natural-gas production would “continue to
decline, even assuming successful exploration and development of the frontier
areas.” Two years later, the CIA panicked over “the limited nature of world oil
reserves,” and predicted that “output must fall within a decade ahead.” The
mantra never changed. In a breathless 2003 Time
piece, Donald R. Barlett and James B. Steele wrote that the U.S. was “running out of energy.” Natural
gas, the Pulitzer-winning journalists declared, was “in scarce supply,” and
petroleum production was “winding down.”
It was all
nonsense, crafted by men who never deserved platforms from which to spout their
ignorance of resource economics. Today, the revival of America’s hydrocarbon sector serves
as a vital bulwark for a wounded and demoralized
nation. Something to smile about while the Land of the Free endures a lengthy
losing streak.
D. Dowd Muska (www.dowdmuska.com) writes about government, economics, and technology. Follow him on Twitter @dowdmuska.
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