People are actually wearing these t-shirts
OK, I don’t like Obama’s proposal to open up vast areas of the Atlantic coast, Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan coast for offshore drilling. There isn’t much oil and gas there–not enough to feed our oil-thirst for more than a few years at best–and many of these areas are already completely despoiled and need to be protected, not ravaged once again. Oil and gas companies will certainly be happy to bid on the new blocks, nevertheless. All the infrastructure to siphon oil and gas out of these tiny little fields is already in place, so their costs will be low despite the paltry return. (They also won’t have to pay for protection as they do in Nigeria and Iraq etc etc.) So long as prices stay high, they’ll be able to make a tidy profit.
But I don’t think it is fair to call Obama’s plan the same as Bush/Cheney/Palin’s. Bush, Cheney and Palin claimed that offshore drilling was sufficient to solve our energy crisis altogether. That’s not what I hear Obama saying about this plan. This is about the government making some money by selling these leases–and we should watch carefully to see where that money goes–to ease the necessary transition away from oil and gas. Very different. Bush saw offshore drilling as a cure, which was dishonest and unfair. For Obama, it’s a band-aid.
Offshore drilling is not going to make oil cheap and it’s not going to allow Americans to continue wantonly burning crude. It isn’t going to liberate us from foreign oil, either. It’s a drop in the bucket. We’ll still need to do all the hard work of transitioning away from hydrocarbons. Obama seems to understand this. And that’s crucial.
