David Holt, President of Consumer Energy Alliance, submitted the following Op-Ed to Independent Petroleum Association of America blog on September 15, 2009.

Critical Issues Overlooked in Current Energy Discussion

There are indeed critical issues being overlooked in the current energy discussion. By focusing so much attention on the climate change component of energy policy, issues like jobs, energy prices, and the development of the full spectrum of energy resources available to us are being overlooked to the detriment of our economy. What we need is a comprehensive, balanced and long term approach to energy policy – one that looks at ways not only to control climate change, but also to lower prices, create jobs, and build the US economy.

The fact of the matter is that for decades to come, our global economy will rely on oil & natural gas for the vast majority of our energy needs, while we continue to work towards developing a diverse energy portfolio that includes wind, hydro and nuclear (among others). To get there from here, we need to focus on a sensible and balanced US energy policy that includes provisions for access to our offshore and onshore oil & gas supplies. Failure to do so is costing this country millions of jobs and putting us at significant competitive disadvantage relative to other nations that more effectively utilize their resources.

The oil & gas industry employs more than 9 million hardworking Americans. But that only tells part of the story. There are 20 million US citizens employed in manufacturing, 10 million in trucking, 10 million in the airline industry, 20 million farmers, 2 million folks making iron & steel, more than 40 million retirees (many living on fixed incomes), and millions more employed by hospitals, restaurants and other industries that directly rely on the availability of energy supplied in a cost effective manner. There has got to be a better way to lower prices, create jobs, and build a better US economy.

Consumer Energy Alliance is working with IPAA and dozens of consumer groups – ranging from agriculture to the service industry – to urge Congress, the Obama Administration and state leaders to seek better ways to ensure hardworking Americans have access to the energy they need – now and in the future. We are well-past time for the nation to act to develop our abundant oil & natural gas, improve our energy security and trade balance, and lessen our dependence on imports from areas of the world that do not have our best interests in mind.

David Holt, President of Consumer Energy Alliance, submitted the following Op-Ed to EnergyBlogs.com on September 15, 2009. View here.

Oil and Water: Why Offshore Drilling and Environmental Protection Are More Compatible Than You Think

One of the most naïve and potentially harmful forms of modern day environmentalism has to be the staunch opposition to oil drilling in the U.S. It’s a view promoted by a lot of not-in-my-backyard types who find a false sense of comfort in the notion that what they don’t see won’t hurt them.

To their credit, many of those same people who consider an offshore oil platform a blight on the environment are doing their part to leave a lighter footprint. They swap their SUVs for a Prius, a Smart Car, or even a bicycle and imply that if everyone else did the same, it would be enough. The problem with this line of reasoning is that the United States and all its residents could do everything in their collective power to curb fossil fuel consumption and, short of bringing the entire American economy to a grinding halt, the country would still remain hugely dependent on oil for decades to come. Like the giant tankers that come to feed our addiction from the Middle East, the North Sea and South America, the country’s oil policy can’t shift course overnight.

Addressing climate change and making serious investments in alternative sources of power are worthy national objectives. But from where we stand today, even under the most optimistic estimates, alternative energy and conservation won’t be able to get us off oil any time soon. The International Energy Agency estimates that alternative energy currently accounts for 7% of our total energy consumption, and will increase its share to 9% by 2030. For the sake of argument, let’s just say the estimate is way too low. Go ahead and double the estimate and you still have a country that needs a lot of oil. You might call it an inconvenient truth.

As long as oil remains the fuel of our modern economy, the question we should really be debating is where we get it. Today, the U.S. consumes one quarter of the world’s oil, but produces only 10% of it. Of the countries that sell us the rest, at least a few share relations with us that are, at best, tense. Many are literally half a world away, resulting in huge financial costs, and a not insignificant global environmental footprint in transporting the oil. (It takes oil to ship oil). Right now we are at a critical time for determining whether or not we set the right course for our economy and our country’s energy development policy for years to come.

We are just two weeks away from the Obama Administration closing a comment period, the results of which will help make a decision that could potentially reverse a moratorium on new offshore leasing that has been in place since 1983. All around the country, as the economy goes south people are starting to recognize that oil is not just a fuel, but a major industry that supports jobs, as well as stability in energy prices. And with today’s new and improving directional technologies, it’s possible to group many wells together allowing multiple subsurface locations to be reached from one platform, which reduces environmental impact.

Voicing your support for the federal government’s “Five-Year Program” – which determines the areas in the U.S. that may be leased for offshore oil and natural gas drilling – is one way to ensure that energy used by Americans is also produced by Americans. If an area is not included in this program, it cannot be leased and is considered off-limits. Therefore, it is imperative that everyone get involved by telling President Obama today that the U.S. needs to responsibly develop its own offshore energy resources. (If you are interested in getting involved, please visit the CEA website, www.consumerenergyalliance.org, or send in a comment by clicking here. The comment period closes September 21, 2009.)

It’s tempting to frame this debate as one between economic and environmental interests. But serious environmentalists understand that you can’t protect the environment by building a fence around your own backyard. Air pollution from China, after all, is showing up in California. Since the U.S. has some of the strictest laws in the world for drilling and producing oil, you have to ask how we are serving the global environment by encouraging – by default – sloppier drilling in places like Russia and Nigeria, which have fragile ecosystems of their own.

Should we then, just throw open the whole country to drilling? Or course not. From the Alaskan tundra to the California coastline and Florida’s sandy beaches, the country has so much natural beauty precisely because of regulations that were put in place to protect it. Any future projects should proceed with great caution, and not commence before thorough reviews conclude the project will not ravage the environment and will yield a substantial volume of oil and/or natural gas.

Decades of improvements in technology that make it possible not only to drill deeper wells but to do so without spills and seepage suggest that at least some locations would meet those criteria. You have to wonder if our not-in-my-backyard attitude toward oil has fueled not just our addiction to foreign oil, but our dangerous indifference to that addiction. We are all more likely to treat our natural resources with the respect they deserve when we understand the process and the effort that goes into developing them.

Our dependence on oil is not going to go away overnight, but when we take more responsibility for what we consume, we’ll be more likely to consume with care. It would be a big improvement from the Out of Sight, Out of Mind attitude about oil that prevails today.

The following op-ed from David Holt, President of Consumer Energy Alliance, appeared on the National Journal website here, in response to the discussion question “Does mineral policy law need reform?”

September 15, 2009   This bill as proposed will add a great deal of regulatory burden and costs on the energy industry. At a time in our country when we need access to all energy resources readily available, and when we need to pay special attention to the economic hardships that consumers are currently experiencing, this is the wrong approach.

The U.S. House Natural Resources Panel recently met to discuss pending bipartisan legislation that aims to increase domestic offshore energy exploration and production. Their approach – one that eases decades old restrictions on American energy production — is the right approach. Their approach takes into consideration the current economic climate in which we are operating, while also helping to pave the way for an economic rebound.

Legislation that includes provisions for accessing domestic offshore energy sources, without overly burdening the industry, translates into legislation could help create millions of jobs, billions in local revenue and pave the way for long-term energy affordability.

David Holt, President of Consumer Energy Alliance, submitted the following Op-Ed to The Washington Times on September 8, 2009.

Refining away affordable fuel

It doesn’t matter where you buy it. It doesn’t matter what you drive. It doesn’t even matter which octane you choose. Every gallon of gasoline combusted in our vehicles emits a chemically consistent 19.4 pounds of carbon dioxide. Congress wants to change that — and it isn’t about to let a silly thing like fuel science stand in its way.

You’ve heard of cap-and-trade. Now meet the low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) — its younger, quieter but just-as-harmful kissing cousin. Cooked up in a California political laboratory over the past decade and being advanced on Capitol Hill by powerful members of both chambers, LCFS has as its goal to force refiners to start producing fuels with a lower-intensity carbon profile. Same price, same power, just with less carbon dioxide coming out of the tailpipe.

Who can be against that?

The laws of science, for starters. It turns out that, short of engaging in outright alchemy, tweaking the molecular profile of refined fuel products isn’t done easily, safely or well. But if an LCFS can’t actually effect a chemical change in the carbon makeup of our fuels, how can its supporters claim it will reduce the amount of carbon dioxide they emit?

The answer is that LCFS isn’t about making the fuels on which we rely today better, cleaner or more energy-efficient. It’s about making those fuels scarcer, more expensive and less available to those who need them. Achieve that, the logic goes, and the alternative energy technologies that can’t compete right now — for one, because they don’t exist in commercial quantities, if at all — will have a fighting chance in the future of gaining market share from the reliable, all-too-affordable energy sources that dominate our markets today.

But, having established that an LCFS can’t simply decree low-carbon fuels into existence, how would a program like this actually work?

Here’s how: First, bureaucrats gather up separate samples of the feedstock involved in producing fuel — crude oil. Each sample is assigned a carbon score, not based on how much carbon is in the oil (remember, that’s constant), but how much energy (and therefore, carbon) it’s estimated was used to bring that oil to market.

Heavy crudes require more energy to produce than light crudes and therefore receive a higher (read “worse”) “life-cycle” carbon score. Oil sands from Canada and oil shale from the American Intermountain West are treated even more harshly under this system. And corn-based ethanol? The way the bureaucrats see it, ethanol is even worse than the rest because farmers in developing countries likely will have to cut down more of their trees to grow corn because Americans are using so much of theirs for fuel. Follow all that?

Once the carbon scores are tallied up, fuel producers are presented with a fairly straightforward choice: Stop using heavier forms of crude to refine into gasoline or start buying up “credits” from the federal government for the right to remain in business. Sound familiar? It’s the exact same transfer mechanism involved in cap-and-trade legislation recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s also the exact same mechanism that will result in your paying a lot more for a gallon of gas in the short term and perhaps even losing your job after that.

But an LCFS is even more sinister than that. Consider: An LCFS, by definition, is set up to discriminate against some forms of crude and benefit others. As it turns out, the forms against which an LCFS discriminates happen to be the ones most readily and affordably available to us — homegrown oil from California and Colorado; Mayan crude from Mexico; and oil sands from Canada, our most important economic and strategic ally in the hemisphere.

Who’s got all the light crude — the kind an LCFS scheme is rigged to favor? The vast majority of the world’s lightest, sweetest crudes happen to be controlled by some of the world’s least reliable and most unstable regimes.

How would turning over an even larger share of our nation’s fuel and energy markets to Middle Eastern energy producers impact American national security? LCFS proponents don’t have a whole lot to say on that front.

The vast majority of Americans have never heard of an LCFS, just as its proponents prefer — and even the ones who have heard of it struggle to remember what the less-than-descriptive acronym stands for. Now you know: An LCFS means higher prices at the pump, fewer good-paying jobs for Americans, complicated Wall Street trading schemes and expanded dependence on energy from unstable regions of the world.

Sounds a lot like cap-and-trade, right? We’d be so lucky.