President Bush and Senator John McCain are both now promoting off-shore domestic drilling [1]. Hallelujah. It took them long enough.
But it is, amazingly, going to yet be an uphill battle. As long as Democrats continue to stand on weak, worthless principles, like “anywhere buy my backyard”, we’re going to have to fight for the things that make sense.
I’m not advocating we put ourselves into a position to cause the kinds of oil disasters that drove us away from drilling off the coasts of California and Florida… but we should have the technology now to provide the safeguards needed to prevent that.
However, in an area that has no people, no tourists, and no real value to people, Bush and McCain continue to oppose drilling. ANWR is a valuable, essential and feasible resource [2]. We need to work with it.
But here’s where it’s getting easy to con people. “Experts” are coming out and saying that the price of oil will not be impacted sufficiently by drilling in ANWR or offshore. Economic experts. People who should know the first rule… the market is driven by emotion as much as by fact… supposedly that part of how we got the last $25 or so of price jump. The minute we approve offshore drilling, and further drilling in Alaska, we will see prices drop and production increase. There will be hope upon hope in the Middle East that we will change our minds if we can just see lower prices. And they might be right… our Congress is a fickle and complicated organ, more so than the electorate.
Call your senators and representative. Let’s convince them it’s time to do the right thing. Let’s rely on ourselves.
And if they don’t listen, let’s vote the bums out.
Thanks to Bitsblog [3] for some great info.