While falling gas prices have toned down the chants of "drill, baby, drill," the perceived benefits of expanding domestic oil production remain fixtures in the popular consciousness.

The "two cents in 10 years" arguments against expanded domestic offshore oil drilling are well known, but attempts to expand controversial drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may prove to be the worst of all possible options. Amory B. Lovins, one of the cofounders of the independent Rocky Mountain Institute has termed drilling in the region "insecure, unimportant, unprofitable and uncompetitive."

For Lovins, who led a Pentagon-co-sponsored study into the theoretical elimination of US oil use by the 2040s, the most obvious shortcoming of tapping the refuge for oil is security. While technically within the borders of the United States, and thus "domestic," oil from ANWR would still be thousands and thousands of miles away from the vast majority of US markets. The only connection between the two is the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, an aging, corroded structure that ex-CIA Director James Woolsey called "indefensible" and that has been shut down in the past by saboteurs as unsophisticated as drunks with rifles.

But even discounting the obvious problem of securing 800 miles of pipe, drilling in the wildlife refuge is unlikely to yield much of a benefit to consumers. Lovins characterizes oil supply in the region as "limited and scattered," and notes that extraction wouldn't begin until 2018 at the earliest. Factoring in the skyrocketing cost of on-shore drilling—up some 564 percent between 2000 and 2005—and the recent volatility of the oil market, expanding drilling operations into ANWR hardly seems worth the economic risk, either.

Lovins instead argues that the US should focus on what it has the ability to do better than any other country: substitute non-oil resources for additional petroleum creation. If the rates of oil savings between 1976 and 1985 (before the oil glut of the 1980s lowered prices and all but killed off conservation efforts), had been maintained, Lovins insists that we would already be free of reliance on Middle Eastern oil resources, without unduly introducing inefficiencies such as tariffs or subsidies into the free market.

Counting energy saved through more efficient cars or alternative forms of transportation as "negabarrels," Lovins pins this cost of oil replacement at a mere $12 per barrel, a fraction of the current crude market prices, even after the crash in prices earlier this year—not to mention "all-American and inexhaustible, climate-safe and secure."

So while exhortations to increase domestic energy production may seem alluring, careful analysis of the data reveals them to be an economically and environmentally dangerous short-term solution to current energy costs.

Photo by Flickr user Madpai