energy policy

Banking panics are supposed to be a forgotten relic of the 19th century, when laissez-faire reigned supreme and the federal government was composed mainly of clerks toiling away in a quiet Southern town by the Potomac River.

But there’s no getting away from human fears, which set off the old-fashioned banking panic that swept through the financial sector last week.

When the economy is fishtailing and the mentality is to circle the wagons, fear is taking hold. Which is not a sound environment for making decisions that have long-term environmental benefits.

The tendency is to deal with the short-term crisis and forget about long-term consequences. Understandable, but not always smart.

Here’s a sign of the times: A survey of chief marketing officers released this month by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business shows that cause-related marketing has plunged to the bottom of the priority list for marketing messages.

Marketing officers increasingly believe that financially-stressed customers are more interested in getting a good deal on products than in hearing that products are nice to polar bears. ...

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As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. A twist on that aphorism might be that a conservative is a liberal who paid $80 to fill up the Volvo.

Polls show that more Americans, even liberal Democrats, support expanded domestic oil production. What if the poll respondents learned that a vast pool of oil sits untapped? It’s three times the size of Saudi Arabia’s reserves and is emphatically within U.S. borders.

What are we waiting for? the poll respondents might exclaim.

Except that there’s a catch. Before the oil can be used, we have to wait 100 million years.

In an age when immediate gratification is considered a virtue, that simply won’t do. Shell is bringing technology to the rescue, to speed things up and tap the estimated 800 billion barrels of shale oil lying beneath the scrubby uplands of the central Rockies.

Shale oil is preemie oil. Strictly speaking, it’s a calcium carbonate rock containing a goopy hydrocarbon called kerogen. If we wait 100 million years, natural subterranean heat may turn the kerogen into crude oil. Since we can’t wait that long, Shell is experimenting with an audacious technology to heat the stuff artificially, and then bring it to the surface to quench our unquenchable oil thirst. More on Shell’s idea in a moment.

Instead of carrying begging bowls to Riyadh, why haven’t we tapped shale before? To answer that question, it’s important to know why crude oil is so valuable. ...

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