Offshore Drilling Is No Answer; New Energy Is

By Letters To The Editor

Published: June 29, 2008

This is in response to Connie Counts of Coeburn [“Drill and ignore the EPA,” June 20], who foolishly believes that offshore drilling is the panacea to our economic woes.

The oil crisis was continued, not by a Democratic Congress dissenting with a hawkish president, but by the initial invasion of Iraq and the attempts to control the oil fields.

It was started in the 1970s when the United States removed a secular, but non-Western dictator, Shah Pahlevi in Iran, and replaced him with the despotic, but Western-friendly, Ayatollah Khomeni. Khomeni, according to many, sold his people and their resources out to America, increasing much of the hatred they have for us today.

Compounding that egregious blunder is the burgeoning demand for worldwide oil – especially by China and India – that siphons the Middle East shipment to the U.S. and causes supply to remain lower than usual.

Additionally, thanks to the so-called “Enron loophole” passed by an overwhelmingly Republican Congress, traders wanting the price of oil to increase for their own profits are going to invest millions upon millions of dollars into the industry to continue to raise prices.

Finally, with Big Oil lobbyists fighting and pressuring an increasingly timid Congress to shoot down bills investing millions of dollars into new-energy technologies, the dependency on foreign oil has never been greater.

Still, Ms. Counts, it is foolish to think that opening up our petroleum reserves and drilling in wildlife refugees is going to have a positive outcome for Americans. The average money saved by each American by 2017 if we were to open up every single area to production and start shipping the oil immediately would be 3.7 cents. Read that again – 3.7 cents in 10 years.

Why? It takes years to bring oil wells online, and even more time to begin the actual process of drilling. With all of the shipyards that build platforms – a two- to three-year endeavor – all booked up, it would take significantly longer, and may end up costing you more at the pump.

How do you think the government is going to pay for all this new equipment? Your grandsons may have a greater knowledge of the problem than either of the two candidates, but if you are simply spouting off their ideas and mixing in some of your own beliefs, it’s clear that your combined knowledge of solutions is nil.

Barack Obama wants to end this country’s dependency on foreign oil and is committed to investing in new, American-made, technologies. John McCain is, as you correctly point out, hype and rhetoric, who doesn’t know what he wants.

As recent as three weeks ago, McCain, at a Greenvale, Wis., campaign stop, had this message about offshore drilling to the audience, “[W]ith those resources, which would take years to develop, you would only postpone or temporarily relieve our dependency on fossil fuels.” McCain said, when asked about offshore drilling, “We are going to have to go to alternative energy, and the exploitation of existing reserves of oil, natural gas, even coal, and we can develop clean-coal technology, are all great things. But we also have to devote our efforts, in my view, to alternative energy sources, which is the ultimate answer to our long-term energy needs, and we need it sooner rather than later.”

That was three weeks ago.

Lastly, Ms. Counts, if you are ludicrously suggesting that God, rather than wind patterns, geographical location and atmosphere control climate, I implore you to do further research on this topic.

Sean McGrath
Stony Brook, N.Y.