For the coming school year, home-schooled debaters will be tackling the resolution, “That the United States should change its energy policy to substantially reduce its dependence on foreign oil.” I’ll be speaking at a home schoolers’ debate camp later this summer, which gives me an incentive to become better informed about this important subject.
But for now, I’ll present my initial reaction to the wording of the resolution itself – specifically, the ambiguity of the word “dependence.” There are two obvious ways of defining dependence: first, in terms of the gross amount of oil we import from abroad (or from a particular region); or second, in terms of the fraction of our oil that we import from abroad (or from a particular region).
The difference matters, because some policies will decrease one form of dependence while increasing the other. Suppose, for instance, that a new energy policy succeeded in substantially reducing American demand for oil. Other things equal, the outcome would be a reduction in the world price of oil. As a result, the marginal oil wells – those that were profitable at the higher price but unprofitable at the lower price – would have to shut down. And where are such oil wells located? Mostly outside the Middle East, in places like the United States and the North Sea. Oil is incredibly cheap to produce in the Middle East, for a variety of reasons. So in the new equilibrium, a larger fraction of the world’s oil production would take place there. America would be importing a smaller amount of oil (reducing our dependency under definition 1), but a larger fraction of the oil we still consumed would come from abroad, and from the Middle East specifically (increasing our dependency under definition 2).
So which definition should we care about? There’s not a clear answer; it depends on the real goal. Suppose that our goal is to deprive Saudi Arabia and other terrorist-breeding states of oil profits. The proposed policy would decrease the total profits of the oil industry (because of the lower price), but Middle Eastern countries would sell a larger share of it. Put simply, the Middle East would get a larger slice of a smaller pie, with an ambiguous overall effect on profits (at least based on theory alone – better information could possibly allow a more precise prediction). Remember that the next time someone tells you that driving an SUV helps fund the terrorists.
(Incidentally, this post is not intended as a criticism of the debate resolution. Ambiguity of this kind can be interesting fodder for debate.)
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