Drill now, pay later

Upon recent discoveries of oil in the kingdom, King Abdullah ordered that those new finds be left untapped to preserve the nation’s oil wealth for future generations. “When there were new finds, I told them, ‘No, leave it in the ground, with grace from God, our children need it,’” the king said.

Behind the king’s statement lies a plain truth: The Saudis prefer to sit on their oil, while we are rushing to deplete ours. The Saudi reserve-to-production ratio – an indicator of how long proven reserves would last at current production rates – is 70 years; Iran’s is 82; the United Arab Emirates’ is 90; and Venezuela’s is 91. Iraq and Kuwait are at more than 100. How long does the U.S. have left? Eleven years.
While America is increasingly dependent on foreign oil, to the detriment of its national and economic security, making domestic drilling the linchpin of our energy policy would perhaps buy us a few more years of complacency in the driver’s seat of our SUVs, after which we would be guaranteed to be in a world in which, in the words of the International Energy Agency, “we are ending up with 95 percent of the world relying for its economic well-being on decisions made by five or six countries in the Middle East.”

Eager as Congress may be to provide Americans immediate relief at the pump, it should consider the long-term implications of breaking America’s oil piggy bank, depleting our last remaining reserves and leaving future Americans even more vulnerable than those of today.

Baltimore Sun