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To drill or not to drill

Drill for oil that is. John McCain called for an end to the moratorium on offshore drilling. Obama says lifting the ban is the wrong answer, “John McCain’s plan to simply drill our way out of our energy crisis is the same misguided approach backed by President Bush that has failed our families for too long and only serves to benefit the big oil companies,”

McCain = Bush blah blah blah. Do people actually fall for that?

Ok, Senator Obama, what is your plan? Oh it’s to create a Windfall Tax Profit. Brilliant. Problem solved. Oh and there’s more. “Obama backs using money raised through an auction of greenhouse-gas emissions credits to bolster research and development projects, while imposing requirements on how much renewable energy public utilities would have to buy.” Oh yes, I see how that can get us off foreign oil. Let’s make Al Gore rich while solving nothing and ruining our economy at the same time.

Change is not always a good thing.

My personal position?   I have always been in favor of hoarding our oil and using up everything in the Middle East first.  When the rest of the world runs out, we will be the only ones left.   Higher gas prices should be our incentive to get off foreign oil.  Let the market take care of it, not government. However, there is a limit to how long we can wait with this strategy.  I’m starting to shift my position a bit.  If we are not going to get serious about hydrogen cars then we really need to start drilling and building more refineries and nuclear plants before we can’t afford to drive to work anymore.  It would be many years before we start seeing the results of new drilling.  Obama says it will be 10 years and uses that as an excuse to not drill.  To me it seems like a reason to not wait any longer.

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This entry was written by Scott Allan and posted on June 17, 2008 and filed under politics. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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7 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

  1.  
    I don’t see any point in feeding our addiction to oil at the expense of our environment and putting off what we will eventually have to do anyway – switch to a cleaner/renewable energy source.

    1. Silke on June 17th, 2008 at 7:13 pm

  2. I’m totally with you Silke.  I want to get off oil completely, but it’s not because of the global warming hoax.   I think using a finite supply of energy that is controlled by fanatics that want to see our demise is absurd.  I would not mind seeing the Middle East go bankrupt.  If we both have the same goal, I guess it doesn’t matter how we get there.  Unfortunately, I don’t think we have the resolve to get there anytime soon.  McCain promised a Manhattan Project type approach to solving this problem during the primary debates.  I haven’t heard anything about it since then though.  I hope he’s true to his word.

    2. Scott Allan on June 17th, 2008 at 9:13 pm

  3. When serious scientists publish peer-reviewed studies that indicate the Earth is warming and the burning of fossil fuels is a major factor I personally do not consider that a hoax. I do think reasonable people can disagree on this issue and I agree with you that the political resolve is not there yet. But when your economy is based on a limited and non-renewable fuel supply located primarily in a volatile and hostile part of the world, prices will continue go up (even if we inject a small percentage into the current supply). The bright side of all this is that as alternate fuel sources become more economically viable the free market will voluntarily make the changes that are so necessary and will eventually happen anyway.

    3. Silke on June 17th, 2008 at 10:23 pm

  4. Let’s hope it happens sooner rather than later.  I’d buy a hydrogen car in an instant if I could.

    4. Scott Allan on June 18th, 2008 at 12:57 am

  5.  
    Getting back to the original point of your post (whether to drill or not), even the White House’s own Energy Information Administration says that exploiting the outer shelf wouldn’t yield noticeable amounts of oil until the 2020s, and even at peak production its impact on oil prices would be “insignificant.”
    Also, according to a study conducted by the Energy Department in 2004, drilling in ANWAR would not reduce the price of oil significantly. We would still have to import two-thirds of our oil, as opposed to an expected 70 percent if the refuge’s oil remained off the market (less than a 4% difference). This wouldn’t even be a short term solution since it would take 9 years for oil to reach the market and 21 years to reach full production.
    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4542853/

    5. Silke on June 20th, 2008 at 8:39 am

  6. All I know is that doing nothing will solve nothing.  If it’s not more oil, I’m open to all other solutions as long as it doesn’t devastate the economy, nuclear, solar, bio, wind, hydrogen, anything.  Unfortunately doing nothing seems to be our national policy.

    I really find it hard to believe that it would take 9 years for oil to reach the market .  The article you referenced says oil would start flowing in 2013, but even that seems ridiculous.  We’re the United States.  You can’t tell me that with all the technology we have and all the money at stake, that we couldn’t get it done much faster than that.   How long does it take to dig a hole and put it in a barrel?   Even a 4% increase in supply would help.  It’s better than the 0% increase we have now.

    Obama wants to use the windfall profit tax to invest in green energy research.   I don’t see this to be a great benefit either.  How long will that take?  How will that effect food supply and prices?  Gas prices will rise even more dramatically in the meantime due to this tax which will get passed on to the consumer.  He will be hurting the poor most of all in the short run.  Somehow we need to provide incentives, not penalties to improve our situation.  Simply saying no to every possible solution is not a solution.   Most likely we will need a combination of solutions to solve this problem.

    6. Scott Allan on June 20th, 2008 at 9:18 am

  7. Well i think we should go to alternative fuel but for the time being we need start drilling offshore. I think this is a must.

    7. oilfield equipment on March 28th, 2009 at 9:12 pm

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