“The enemy of conventional wisdom,” John Kenneth Galbraith, who coined the term, once wrote, “is not ideas, but the march of events.” And although it doesn’t appear as if the former U.S. ambassador to India was talking about offshore energy’s record of environmental stewardship when he wrote it, that doesn’t make his words any less relevant to an age-old debate that surrounds a fairly simple and straightforward question:

Does energy production offshore pollute our waters? Conventional wisdom might suggest that it does. Can energy production offshore actually help reduce pollution in our waters? Conventional wisdom would suppose that it can’t.

In this case, both would be wrong. We’ll let the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) pick it up from here:

New estimates indicate that the overall amount of petroleum released to the marine environment may be lower than earlier thought. This reflects, in part, advances over the last decade in marine transportation and oil and gas production techniques.

How much “lower than earlier thought” are we talking here? Quite a lot, according to NAS. Turns out that of the measurable hydrocarbon pollution in place in U.S. waters today, 63 percent of it comes from a single, devious source: Mother Nature, in the form of natural seepage. And how much comes from efforts to produce oil and natural gas offshore? Would you believe if it was less than one percent?

Conventional wisdom wouldn’t. Thankfully, the march of events and the efforts of a single man in California are starting to bend the narrative back.  

Go ahead: Just ask a fella named Bruce Allen how hard he’s worked over the years to find folks willing to listen to the facts: He’s testified on Capitol Hill, been published in newspapers across the country, and just this week, even teamed up with The Heritage Foundation to publish a detailed background primer on how increased access to energy offshore would actually help our natural environment, not harm it. From his paper:

The economic benefits from increased domestic hydrocarbon production are well known, but many erroneously assume they come at an environmental cost. In truth, there are opportunities … to achieve substantial environmental benefits from drilling as a consequence of reduced seepage of oil and natural gas into the air and water. Expanded offshore oil and gas production can genuinely be a win-win proposition.

Is it so difficult to understand how this would work? Billions of barrels of oil – and more trillions of units of natural gas – seeps naturally into our nation’s waters each year, literally bursting through the ocean floor and immediately assuming the form of natural pollution.

What if there existed a way – follow us here – that allowed us to access that energy BEFORE it bled out on its own? What if there existed a way to turn a form of pollution into a means of economic revitalization – in so doing, materially reducing the amount of oil that seeps naturally into our nation’s oceans?

Boy, that would be awesome. Wonder if we’ll ever come up with a method for doing it.