2018

I will post a yearly reminder that last summer, the summer of ought eight, our spirited presidential debates provoked waves of outcry for ANWR drilling. We heard that, if we got started then, ANWR would be on-line and producing oil in ten years. 2018.

Today, ten years is still ten years away, but we are one year farther along without a single wellhead, access road, exploration rig, or anything else working to coax our domestic oil from the frozen tundra. 2019 if we started today, and we're not starting. So 2020 at the earliest.

This is a direct consequence of cheap oil today. We don't bother to spend any on future infrastructure because (god forbid) what would happen if future oil is also cheap? We wouldn't recoup our investment.

Do you think that the price spikes of 2007 had anything to do with our current economic malaise? Or was it the economic conditions that led to the price spikes? I don't think for a minute that we've seen the last of increasing energy costs. We burn less oil now, for sure, due to our stagnant growth, but we still burn an awful lot, and all we've done is decreased the marginal cost of that last barrel of oil. If we resume our 3.5% growth (as everyone predicts by this summer, ha!) then we'll resume our 3.5% oil demand growth too....all while Mexico will produce less this year than last...all while the US will produce less this year than last.