The ban on offshore drilling expires tonight at midnight Eastern Time.  At this writing, that’s just five hours away.  

Congress was incredibly preoccupied during the weeks following its lengthy vacation, and could not (supposedly) get the work done to extend the moratorium on drilling for this oil.  Such a ban would normally have been included in the $600 billion stopgap funding bill passed last week, but would have likely led to a fight that would have shut down the government.  Instead of chasing that fight, they’ve left it up to the next Congress to address this issue.  Keep that in mind on election day.

Tomorrow (October 1) is known by many now as Energy Freedom Day.  This might be temporary, but we’ll take what we can get.

It’s very likely that Democrats could sense which way the winds were blowing and sought to soften their position in an election year where necessary.

The price of crude went back up today, back to $102/bbl.  It will be interesting to see how the price moves on Wednesday, and what gestures, even if symbolic, are made by oil companies to move toward drilling.

And maybe the next stop is ANWR.

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