Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

I’ve thought for some time that the most sensible approach to the oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge is to hold onto it until we need it. The amount of oil there is irrelevant to today’s economy. On current trends, the total production would be some 1% of the world’s oil production, not enough to make a real difference.

We should be thankful that we have a reserve of oil in our country, and we should wait on trying to dig it out until we have a real use for it, a use beyond just burning it to move cars around.

As far as I can tell, the only people who would advocate drilling today are those who stand to make money on it now. It would be irresponsible to cater to those people at the expense of the majority.

This thinking is quite separate from the status of the ANWR as a wildlife refuge.

Our drug laws don’t work. Immense amounts of money are spent on drugs. Because drugs are illegal, this money goes to criminals. This leads to ghastly levels of violence in places like Mexico and Colombia. Drug money supports the Taliban (admittedly this money is probably mostly from Europe) which spends it on attacking U.S. armed forces. Drug money helps destroy poor areas within the U.S. by ensuring that the wealthiest, most powerful, people are criminals who flout the law.

Why do we do this? Tobacco kills far more people than any other drug. Alcohol destroys many lives. Nobody is trying to make them illegal. This is a clear double-standard.

I think we should legalize most drugs. Relatively minor drugs like marijuana should be regulated and taxed like tobacco (a new source of government revenue which everybody could support). Major drugs like heroin should be illegal to sell but legal to possess and legal to give away to adults. The money we currently spend on interdicting supply should be spent instead on counseling and research on how to end addiction.

Illegal drugs are generally bad for you. Some will fry your brain much faster than alcohol. If drugs are legal, it is likely that more people will try them, and it is likely that more brains will be fried. But there is a trade-off here. We know for sure that making drugs illegal is destroying many lives. We don’t know how many lives will be destroyed if drugs are legalized. We need to find out. The way to find out is for the Federal government to step out of drug regulation and to leave it to the states.

This is a harsh position to take: it means that some people will be hurt. But the current situation is really bad. We need to try something different, not just more of the same.

I’m somewhat surprised that the Republican party doesn’t support this position. Getting the government out of drug enforcement makes it smaller. Eliminating drug laws means giving people the responsibility to look after themselves, rather than depending on the government to look after them. Admittedly the evangelical wind of the party would not support repealing these laws.

I’m very surprised that there is no active debate on this issue. How can our societal consensus be a policy that is so clearly broken?

The New York Time had a big article on Sunday on missed opportunities to cut oil consumption. The article covers various ideas, but it focuses on automobile fuel standards. I think that is a mistake.

I do think that the automobile fuel standards should be higher. Historically the American car companies have argued against this, but that was very short-sighted of them. It was always clear that eventually they would be caught short as gas prices went up. They should have been planning for higher gas prices all along, and they should have gone along with higher fuel standards. The arguments against it seem foolish to me. Japan has much higher fuel standards than the U.S., yet Japanese car companies are doing just fine–in general quite a bit better than U.S. car companies, though of course the Japanese companies also benefit from better government health policies.

However, although automobiles are the main users of oil (70% in the U.S., I think), simply focusing on getting them to use less oil is too narrow. It would have been much better for the U.S. government to strongly encourage the development of non-oil energy sources. This could have been done through direct R&D investment and by creating markets via tax incentives and direct purchase. The discretionary part of the U.S. budget is heavily weighted toward the military, and indeed this is a national security issue. The military could and should have been asking for equipment which was low energy and did not require oil. The technologies developed that way would have spilled into the civilian sector as so many others have.

There is still time for this sort of thing, but we should have started it 30 years ago after the first oil crisis. It’s hard for me to understand why we didn’t. I know that it is possible for the U.S. government to make sensible choices when there is no crisis, but in this case it failed.

We are most likely facing two significant problems in this century. The first is climate change due to increased greenhouse gases. The second is the loss of our major energy source due to oil depletion. I think it’s interesting that solving one problem is likely to solve the other one at the same time.

The only way to address the potential of climate change is to develop new energy sources and/or to develop new ways to doing what we do today while using significantly less energy. In principle, we could address climate change by reducing our energy use by doing less. In practice, that will not happen. No government is both strong enough and tough enough to enforce that. The sacrifice is too great for people to do it willingly. If we can’t find new energy sources or large energy savings, we will wind up spending our time figuring out how to deal with the consequences of climate change.

The only way to address oil depletion is to develop new energy sources. If we can’t do that, we will have to struggle through sweeping changes to our society, which is based on cheap and portable energy.

Theoretically we could postpone the oil depletion issue by moving to something like liquified coal. That would not help with climate change, and would only help us for a couple of hundred years at most. A proper fix for oil depletion will be to find a renewable energy source. Finding such a source will address the climate change problem at the same time.

We’ve seen these problems coming for a long time, more than thirty years. Unfortunately there have been few organized efforts to address them. We can only hope that that will start to change in the near future.

I’m back from vacation following the GCC summit.

Since I was on vacation, I wonder: why are science and technology museums so often aimed at children, and art museums so often not? It’s as though science is naturally presented as educational, whereas art is something you simply appreciate.

To me it would seem more natural to do it the other way around. Art museums should show you information about the artist, the milieu, the technology used, how it developed. Science museums should show you the results, and should drop the interactive exhibits and the kid stuff. No doubt I feel this way because I know more about science than about art. Presumably museum curators tend to be the other way around.

There are certainly excellent science museums aimed at adults, like the New York Natural History Museum. A surprisingly good museum is the Transportation Museum in Owls Head, Maine. I’m sure there are many others, but somehow most of the ones I’ve been to are disappointing.