However, for someone working in the clean energy industry, this new development is also somewhat troubling. It’s no secret when the price of oil goes down, there is less incentive and excitement to adopt clean, renewable energy. Consider when gasoline prices are high; suddenly high-mileage, high-efficiency cars seem like a good idea. But when gasoline prices drop, there is less incentive to save fuel. This is the problem with an abundance of domestic oil – many people won’t understand why we should invest in higher-cost renewable energy when we can have (relatively) dirt cheap energy from homegrown-oil. So the prospects of ditching cheap oil for clean energy appears to be further away than it was before the development of these new extraction technologies.
Make no mistake, though, cheap oil doesn’t mean safe oil. All of the environmental dangers that are around when oil is expensive are still around when oil is cheap. Perhaps even more dangerous is that cheap oil will be used more extensively than expensive oil, since there is little incentive for efficiency and conservation. Just because we won’t need to rely on foreign oil as much doesn’t mean we are in the clear and no longer need to strive for clean energy.
So how can we use this boom in oil to our advantage? Well, there’s no question that we need this oil. We aren’t currently at a point where we can shut off oil consumption, so our oil is going to need to come from somewhere – it might as well come from our own country. But rather than using this oil for the next 100 years and forgetting about renewables, we need to invest the money made from domestic oil into developing renewable energy. 100 years of oil, though appearing to be a long time now, isn’t actually all that long. Sooner or later we will need to switch to clean energy. On top of that, most climate scientists agree that we simply do not have 100 years to sit on our hands. Many climate scientists believe we are already too late to avoid significant ecological, environmental, and economic hardship as a result of waiting this long to address climate change.
This new abundance of American oil is a good thing, but it is imperative that we consider this oil abundance with intelligent, clear minds and realize we haven’t been given a get-out-of-jail-free card. It doesn’t matter where our oil comes from, it has the same potential to catastrophically change this planet. Every effort must be taken to reduce our dependence on oil, both foreign and domestic.
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