EDITORIALS
Policy, not panic
Benefits of drilling are years away, and it’s not the real answer anyway
The growing demand for the United States to end its ban on offshore oil drilling should be seen for what it is. Panic.
Whatever the proximate cause of the current gasoline price spikes — Arabs stepping on the hose, environmentalists protecting fish and bears, oil companies gouging us because they can — the panic felt by gasoline buyers and presidential candidates flows from the same well: More than three decades of all talk and no action on putting together a real federal energy policy.
That inaction is likely to be the most costly to the American people in many ways, including a tremendous loss of jobs, a reduction in our standard of living, the loss of a credible foreign policy and a push into more interventions that could cost American lives.
The price of gasoline has gone well above $4 a gallon, and is likely to stay there. Voters of all ideological stripes are increasingly weary of the military implications of our dependence on unstable Middle East nations for petroleum. Government is split between a Democratic Congress and a Republican White House. And it’s an election year.
So, for the umpteenth time in the last 35 years, our leaders are all hot and bothered about, as John McCain put it the other day, decreasing our “dependence on foreign oil.”
The problem with that oft-used phrase is that it is one word too long. The key to America’s energy future is to decrease our dependence on oil. Period.
That will take awhile. It starts with conservation, including tough mileage standards. Further options include clean renewables such as wind and solar, plentiful but dirty coal and still-frightening nuclear power. All have big problems. But the fact that we as a nation have constantly kicked this can on down the road is the reason why, when gasoline supplies get tight, the first impulse among so many people is to drill, drill, drill.
Neither house of Congress has tackled the real job of creating a sustainable energy policy that curtails oil dependency. Successive Republican and Democratic presidents also have failed that task. Arab nations, who sold us oil and then used that money on weapons and terrorists, had the ear of presidents. Lobbyists from oil companies who turned in the most obscene profits in history had the ear of presidents. The one group presidents have refused to hear was the 303 million citizens who will pay the price of inaction.
McCain, the Republican candidate for president, used to be against offshore drilling. Now he’s for it. President Bush, by calling Wednesday for congressional action to open up more offshore land for drilling, is repudiating a policy instituted by his own father when he was in the White House.
Both act as though a nation that owns less than 2 percent of the world’s petroleum reserves, yet consumes a quarter of the world’s oil, can drill its way to energy security.
If that were so, then one question to ask is why the oil companies have never quite gotten around to actually drilling on some 68 million acres of already-leased federal land that has been in their hands but not under their drill bits. Could it be because they aren’t really interested in more drilling so much as they are in carrying the value of leases on their books as an asset, without weighing themselves down with the cost of actually digging it up?
The Democratic Party as a whole shares the blame for the decades of inaction on energy. But, today, their general opposition to offshore drilling is the correct one. (McCain even remains opposed to drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, while Bush and other Republicans favor it.)
Such personages as presidential candidate Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Leader Harry Reid and House Rules Committee Chairwoman (and New Yorker) Louise Slaughter are united in understanding that the practical limits of actually finding, pumping, refining and delivering oil products are not to be overcome by removing any off-limits signs. It will take too long, cost too much in too many ways and stands little chance of actually relieving the upward pressure on gas prices any time soon.
The Republican answer to high oil prices — drill — is not an answer at all. It is another push of the same old panic button.
