Peak Oil Panic

Is the planet running out of gas? If it is, what should the Bush administration do about it?

Ronald Bailey from the May 2006 issue

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Economides worries that the conventional wisdom that oil-producing countries do not want to cause a global economic recession is wrong. “The danger posed by the axis of energy militants—Venezuela, Iran, and, increasingly, Russia under President Vladimir Putin—is that they could not care less,” he says. “These militants hardly have functioning real economies whose workings would be adversely affected by a recession.” Economides’ views looked prophetic when oil prices jumped to a three-and-half-month high after Iran’s threat in January to retaliate against any United Nations sanctions imposed to curb its nuclear ambitions by cutting its oil exports.

Despite the recent jump in oil prices, the world’s economy has not slowed down. Why not? Goldman Sachs notes that oil is less important than it was a generation ago. At the height of the Iranian oil crisis in 1980–81, paying for gasoline took up 4.5 percent of U.S. GDP and 7.2 percent of U.S. consumer expenditures. In 2005, even though U.S. gas prices peaked at $3.07 per gallon after Hurricane Katrina, only 2.6 percent of GDP went to pay for gas and consumers spent only 3.7 percent of their incomes to fuel their cars and SUVs. Goldman Sachs believes gasoline prices would need to exceed $4 per gallon before consumers really started to cut back.

As the oil crisis of the 1970s demonstrated, while the demand for oil is inelastic in the short run, consumers do eventually adjust to higher prices. U.S. oil consumption declined by 13 percent between 1973 and 1983. According to Frederick Cedoz, vice president of the D.C.-based energy and political risk consulting group Global Water and Energy Strategy Team, “We get three times more GDP out of a barrel of oil than we did in the 1970s.”

The higher prices of the 1970s led eventually to an oil glut and prices below $10 a barrel by 1986. Should one or more of the “energy militants” choose to deploy the “oil weapon” again, they will cause considerable economic pain to the developed countries. But detonating the oil weapon would end up disarming the energy militants for a generation, after consumer cutbacks produce a new glut.

Oil War Hawks

Unfortunately, you don’t have to go to Iran, Russia, or Venezuela to find energy militants. We have some homegrown ones right here in America, and they think the world is already in the opening stages of a global energy war. Last July, the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., assembled some of the scariest American oil war hawks for a program called “The Coming Energy Wars: A 21st Century Time Bomb?”

All the participants apparently accept the idea that world oil supplies are about to decline, and they all share a zero-sum view of natural resources. According to the Heritage panelists, the chief villain in the coming energy wars is China. Referring to China as the “Thirsty Dragon,” Cedoz warned, “China wants to lock up supplies at the wellhead with long-term purchase contracts.” He darkly pointed to Chinese negotiations over oil supplies in Sudan, Ecuador, and Colombia. (Actually, if the Chinese sign up for long-term contracts, that would encourage producers to invest more in production. That would benefit all consumers, not just the Chinese.)

Refurbished cold warrior Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, opposed the $18.5 billion bid by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation for the California-based oil company Unocal last year. “It’s a very ill-advised transaction,” said Gaffney. “It’s not in our interests to turn over more of our finite resources to others. They should be taken off the market.” Our finite resources? Seventy percent of Unocal’s reserves and production are located in East Asia and the Caspian Sea region.

The Chinese company withdrew its bid after a number of congressmen promised to outlaw the sale. But Gaffney isn’t breathing easier. China’s oil grab, he announced, “is only part of a larger plan to deny us strategic minerals, strategic choke points, and strategic regions. Their purpose is to deny the U.S. a dominant role in the world and if necessary to defeat us.”

Ilan Berman, vice president for policy at the American Foreign Policy Council, regretted that “energy is not viewed through a national security prism. We should be competing to lock up supplies and diversifying and exploring new technologies.” Berman argued that as resources become scarcer there is no way to avoid a zero-sum game. “We have to approach this through the lens of the haves and have-nots,” he declared.

One dissenting voice at the Heritage Foundation session was Harvey Feldman, a former ambassador to Papua New Guinea and an East Asian specialist. “Berman is suggesting that we change from a paradigm of relying on the market,” said Feldman. “OK, we’re going to be in competition with the British, Japanese, French, Germans, Indians, and everybody else. Is this really in the interest of the United States?” Given that most of the experts in the oil business don’t think the world is about to run out of oil, this is one time to hope that President Bush is listening to his buddies in the oil industry.

Instead of preparing for an energy war, the best policy is to let markets have free rein. Even if, say, the Iranians make the political decision to disrupt the flow of oil to world markets, those markets left to themselves will eventually discipline them. The temporarily higher prices will encourage more exploration and technological advances, which will bring energy prices back down. On the day of his inauguration in 1981, President Ronald Reagan lifted oil price controls. Five years later oil prices fell below $10 a barrel.

One day, the oil age will end. As with all resources, there is ultimately a finite supply of oil. So it is not yet clear how the world will power itself for the bulk of the coming century. But we have at least another three decades to find alternatives to petroleum. “Trusting markets is the only way we can assure energy abundance in the future,” notes the University of Houston’s Economides. “It’s also the only way that we will ever transition to something other than oil and gas.”