By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Here is a news lead that begins with a bang and ends with
a whimper: “The strike on the heartland of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry,
including damage to the world’s biggest petroleum-processing facility, has
driven oil prices to their highest level in” — here, Reuters should have used
some ellipses of irony — “nearly four months.”
Four months!
If the United States declines to go to war against Iran
on behalf of Saudi Arabia, our increasingly troublesome client state, one of
the reasons for that happy development will be: because we do not need to. It
is no longer the case that the world sneezes when the Saudis catch a cold. U.S.
interests and Saudi interests remain aligned, broadly, but they are severable.
The high-tech method of mining shale formations for oil
and gas colloquially known as “fracking” — though hydraulic fracturing is only
a part of it — has been a game-changer for more than one game. While countries
such as Germany set headline-grabbing, politics-driven carbon-reduction targets
only
to woefully fail to achieve them (it is very difficult to greenwash 170
million tons of brown coal), the United States has been relatively successful
on that front, reducing energy-related carbon emissions by 14 percent from
2005 to 2017, thanks to natural gas; put another way, fracking has helped
the United States to what climate activists ought to consider one of its
greatest environmental victories.
When the United States intensified its attention to the
Middle East in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the country was heavily dependent
on petroleum imports. Today, the United States is the world’s largest exporter
of petroleum — thanks to fracking. The pointy-headed guys in the Washington war
rooms spend a lot less time worrying about whether tankers can get through the
Strait of Hormuz these days. And that means the United States has a much more
free hand — and more realistic options — when dealing with Riyadh, Tehran, or
any of the other pits of vipers that pass for national capitals in that part of
the world.
“No war for oil!” they chanted when George W. Bush’s
administration prepared to invade Iraq. It was always a stupid slogan — if we’d
wanted to get our hands on that Iraqi oil, we could simply have bought it at a
discount rather than pay a horrifying blood premium for it — but now that chant
can reasonably be turned back on its authors: If you want less war, then you
should want a lot more fracking.
And not just here in the United States, even though the
people of New York State, for example, would be much better off without
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s idiotic and politically driven prohibition on the most
effective means of petroleum production. Spain has seen its demand for natural
gas climb as worldwide production drives prices down, but, thanks to its own
Cuomos, the country remains largely dependent on imports from Algeria and
Nigeria — even though it sits on reserves that by some estimates are equal to
the better part of a century’s consumption. The United Kingdom may be able to
extricate itself from the European Union, but if nothing changes, it will remain
vulnerable to the same Russian energy pressure as much of Europe. In much
the same way that increased petroleum production has given the United States a
stronger position vis-à-vis the Middle East, more British and European
production means more British and European options.
Set aside the fantasy of “energy independence.” World
energy markets are heavily integrated, and it probably is never going to be the
case that what happens in Saudi Arabia or Russia or Iran has no effect on U.S.,
British, or European prices and supplies. And even if that happy state comes to
be someday, it is not the case now and will not be the case in the near future:
The spare capacity that allows the world petroleum markets to function smoothly
provides, at the moment, a margin that is insufficient to cover the production
that could realistically be taken offline by a broader Iranian attack on Saudi
energy infrastructure. U.S. refineries remain disproportionately optimized for
the relatively high-sulfur oil we’ve long imported rather than for the “light
sweet” crude we produce. Our own energy infrastructure, and that of the rest of
the world, remains far too vulnerable to terrorism and conventional military
attack. There is much work to be done.
It all begins with supply. The more supply there is, the
more incentive to build out and improve the infrastructure, the more liquid the
market, the less fragile the system. There is no substitute for abundance — and
a wide choice of providers. Every barrel of oil and cubic foot of natural gas
produced outside of the Middle East and Russia makes the United States and its
allies better off.
Beady-eyed realpolitik used to mean deferring to
the world’s big oil producers when it came to our relations in the Middle East.
Now it means being the world’s big oil producer and — once they decide they’ve
grown tired of unnecessarily taking on risk while giving up wealth, income, and
jobs — helping our British and European allies become bigger players, too.
Fracking involves some real environmental challenges — American producers and
regulators have developed great skill at dealing with them. The environmental
challenges of fracking are manageable. The Saudis and the Iranians are
manageable, too, but at a radically higher cost in blood and resources.
Politics is about tradeoffs. We owe it to ourselves to
take the smart one.
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