Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
East, since beliefs about the relationship between oil and international
security have a way of creating consequences of their own.
Similarly, with rising prospects within the United States (and
Canada), large U.S. oil companies may feel less pressure than they have
in the past to invest in politically fraught, war-torn, or corrupt coun-
tries abroad. h e U.S. government has ot en been called on to protect
and advocate those companies' overseas interests, a task frequently in
conl ict with other U.S. foreign policy goals, including human rights
promotion. 50 One can debate whether the U.S. government should
get enmeshed in such i ghts between private companies and foreign
governments; U.S. involvement is ot en driven by misguided beliefs
about what's needed to promote security of U.S. energy supplies. Yet
so long as some U.S. policymakers are strongly compelled to intervene
on behalf of U.S. oil companies abroad, any trend that turns those
companies increasingly toward North America could have benei ts for
the United States.
T he future of American oil looks drastically dif erent from only a
few years ago. Back then the big question was how to deal with
scarcity. Today it is the possibility of plenty that is at the forefront. What
will actually happen depends substantially on two factors: demand for
oil and what Americans decide to do with the bounty that's under-
ground. Most of the land that fueled the i rst stage of the American
oil renaissance was private. Going much farther will require making
far more inroads into public lands—and whether this happens in a big
way will be up to the American people.
High oil prices and technological breakthroughs mean there are
ot en large gains to be had from producing more U.S. oil. Expanding
access to oil-rich territory for increasing production will create new
economic opportunities; it will also reduce, though far from eliminate,
U.S. economic and security vulnerabilities stemming from the criti-
cal role of oil in the American economy and in geopolitics. (Greater
U.S. oil production might also af ect ef orts to cut oil use, a possibility
we'll explore in Chapter 5.) But there is no magic line beyond which
the United States will become energy-independent—no threshold in
 
 
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