No Energy Policy Impacts Alaska

One Asks: With No National Energy Policy, What Are Alaska's Prospects for Refilling TAPS With NPR or OCS Oil?

Houston Chronicle by John Hofmeister.  With no national energy policy, here's the track record. In the past five years the nation's electric utilities have shelved plans for more than 100 new coal plants because the barriers were too great to build them. They have ignored gasification of coal because they can't get a high enough price to pay for the technology. More than 100 nuclear plants were built in the 1960s and '70s. The last one built was finally commissioned in the early 1990s, having endured more than a decade of delay. Not a single new plant has been built since, and I can all but guarantee that another one will not be built or commissioned in this decade. Time marches on. Many nuclear plant licenses begin expiring in this decade. The nation has endured 30 years of congressional and presidential moratoria prohibiting offshore drilling across 85 percent of the nation's outer continental shelf. While the law expired in 2008 and President George W. Bush took seven and a half years to lift the presidential moratoria, nothing has happened since then. Support for future drilling shows up in occasional words, not actions. For oil and gas companies to expand their operations into the nation's reservoirs of untouched oil and gas resources they need approved leases, actions not words. Instead we “fritter at the edges” of our energy system by promoting subsidized wind, solar and biofuels, pretending to remake the nation's energy system. Addressing 2 percent of our energy supply by promising to double it and double it again with subsidized funding does not make a new energy system.