Offshore drilling: "a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy"

Soaring crude oil and energy prices are crippling the economy, driving up food, transportation and production costs, and eroding our standard of living.

Thomas Friedman writes that President Bush's proposal to address soaring gasoline and energy prices through offshore drilling, which has been adopted hook, line, and sinker by Republican Presidential nominee John McCain, is "...a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy...."

His Sunday column begins:

Two years ago, President Bush declared that America was “addicted to oil,” and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it. Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: “Get more addicted to oil.”

Actually, it’s more sophisticated than that: Get Saudi Arabia, our chief oil pusher, to up our dosage for a little while and bring down the oil price just enough so the renewable energy alternatives can’t totally take off. Then try to strong arm Congress into lifting the ban on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

It’s as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: “C’mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we’ll all go straight. I’ll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.”

It is hard for me to find the words to express what a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy this is. But it gets better.

Friedman's entire column is linked.

McCain seeks votes, not lower gas prices

Paul Krugman suggests in his column today that Senator McCain's conversion to offshore drilling has more to do with politics than lowering gas prices.

As I wrote yesterday, drilling on the outer shelf won't produce enough oil to have a significant impact on the price of crude oil. But it may very well increase McCain's appeal to the Republican base.

Krugman writes:

As many reports have noted, the McCain/Bush policy on offshore drilling doesn’t make sense as a response to $4-a-gallon gas: 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.”

But what I haven’t seen emphasized is the broader picture: Mr. McCain has now aligned himself with an administration that, even aside from its blame-the-environmental-movement tendencies, has established an extensive track record as the gang that couldn’t think straight about energy policy...

So why would Mr. McCain associate himself with these characters? The answer, presumably, is that it’s a cynical political calculation.

I’m reasonably sure that Mr. McCain’s advisers realize that offshore drilling would do nothing for current gas prices. But they may believe that the public can be conned. A Rasmussen poll taken before Mr. McCain’s announcement suggests that the public favors expanded offshore drilling, and believes (wrongly) that this would lower gasoline prices.

And Mr. McCain may also hope to shore up his still fragile relations with the Republican base... there are many people on the right who believe that all our energy problems have been caused by sanctimonious tree-huggers. Mr. McCain has just thrown that constituency some red meat.

The entire article is linked.

Offshore drilling will not reduce gasoline prices!

John McCain continues his embrace of pandering as an electoral strategy.

Only a few months ago, he suggested suspending the federal gas tax as a solution to rising crude oil and gas prices. The electorate rejected this proposal which at worst would have driven up prices by increasing demand and at best saved consumers only a few dollars over the 3 month moratorium.

Now Senator McCain has embraced drilling offshore for oil, suggesting that opening up the nation's coastal waters for oil exploration can produce sufficient quantities of oil to reduce prices.

McCain is simply pandering again.

We are 3% of the world's population and consume 25% of its oil. There is not enough oil off shore or in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to drill our way out of this problem.

Take President Bush's push to drill in the ANWR which has an an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil. According to the Energy Department ANWR would only reduce the price of crude oil per barrel by about 75 cents, 17 years from now.

The price of crude oil per barrel has jumped 100 dollars in the Bush Era and prices have doubled. Shaving the crude oil price 75 cents by 2025 amounts to no savings at the pump.
That's what we would get for ANWR's 10 billion barrels.

What about the moratorium areas off continental America's coastlines some of which McCain now supports eliminating?

McCain estimates that there 21 billion barrels in the moratorium areas. The Energy Department put it at 18 billion a few years ago. Popular Mechanics reports an estimate of 19 billion.
Whoever is right, it is only about double of what's estimated in ANWR.

So, if lifting the moratorium on most offshore drilling has double the impact on price as lifting the ANWR ban would, that's only $1.50 off the price of crude per barrel. Combined with ANWR, it's $2.25 by 2025.

Lifting the moratorium on drilling offshore would have no immediate or long term impact on the price at the pump! There is simply not enough oil.