Drill Here. Drill Now. Flawed?
If you supported off-shore drilling you were characterized as not caring for the environment or supporting big oil. For weeks we have been told that off-shore drilling will not produce any tangible results for 10 years and only result in pennies of savings.
How could anybody get behind that? Let alone shift there campaign policies? Well, Obama believes his policy change, to support off-shore drilling, is an act of bipartisan compromise in order to advance alternative energy/fuel policies.
Really?
No.The fact of the matter is that a vote “against” off-shore drilling appears to the American public as not caring about the struggles at the pump. Obama’s change in policy is more a move for votes. So be it he is running for President. I just have to ask Obama supporters:
How many policy changes do you tolerate before questioning your support?
As far as the message that off-shore drilling will do nothing to elevated prices at the pump. Have we not learned anything from speculators this summer? oil doesn’t need to be out of the ground in order to affect the prices at the pump. The simple fact, easing off-shore drilling or even opening ANWAR increases the amount of supply available. Whether oil companies have increased the number of rigs or not.
Oil is not broken. How we us it is.
[photos via obama'08]
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The only thing more drilling will accomplish at this stage is delaying the inevitable. We will run out of exploitable oil eventually. Even if we start drilling today, we won’t see any tangible effect at the pump for years. There may be a brief, largely psychological effect, but prices and costs will not be affected to any significant degree.
I’m still paying over $4.00 at the pump, even though oil has lost $12 in price over the past week. Do you really think the oil companies are going to willingly give up their record profits without the use of force or regulation?
If you do, I hope there’s room in your fantasy world for me to move in.
I know I didn’t say it in this post, but I have said it in past posts. Off-shore drilling is not meant to solve the problem. Additional drilling is just meant to choose where we want the plateau. Additional research in alternatives fuels and hybrids is still needed. You can not get off oil completely. It’s not a fantasy world either, if you knew how much oil we use on things other than transportation you’d see where I am coming from. I have a feeling you wouldn’t listen to me anyway, so open your eyes and ears and look for it yourself.
Actually, I do understand how much oil we use in our daily lives. We eat, breathe and swim in the stuff (figuratively, of course). Oil is so much a vital part of industrial society that without it our civilization will collapse. That’s what makes it imperative that we begin working toward replacing it as an energy source, and the sooner the better.
It’s not just transportation; the price of oil affects everything from farming to fertilizers to the toys our kids play with. At least the toys are recyclable; once we’ve burned the stuff it’s gone.
Hard choices will have to be made. We can either start making them now, or we can stick more needles in the ground in our desperate attempts to prolong our addiction. I worry that if we start drilling more wells, we’ll slip back into the complacency of the 1980’s and ’90’s and undo the progress we’ve begun to make. Americans are so terribly lazy that way.
If that happens, the collapse will be even more painful than the decline is now.