The way to address our energy needs is not to drill, but to alter our energy needs, to conserve and find alternative sources.
And yet, President Barack Obama announced a plan today to open more land to drilling with this contradictory claim:
“There will be those who strongly disagree with this decision, including those who say we should not open any new areas to drilling,” Mr. Obama said. “But what I want to emphasize is that this announcement is part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies more on homegrown fuels and clean energy.”
So, according to the president, we are going to move from an economy that runs on fossil fuels to on that runs on newly drilled fossil fuels? Is the only goal to reduce dependence on foreign oil? Or is it to move away from greenhouse-gas-producing fuel sources?
But this may not be about clean energy at all. As the Times story suggests, this may have been more about prospecting for votes for a relatively weak climate change bill, the benefits of which may end up being offset by the damage done to our oceans — will a rather paltry amount of oil to show for our efforts.
Oil company executives and geologists expressed guarded enthusiasm for the president’s initiative. But experts said it was impossible to know how much oil and gas the new tracts contain, in part because some existing data is based on 30-year-old studies.
Even at the high end of government estimates, the new production, if and when it occurs, will displace only a small fraction of the oil and gas the country now imports and consumes.
And that just seems a bad tradeoff and should make the voters who viewed Obama as a savior question their allegiance to him, a point made by Frank Tursi, a preservationist with the North Carolina Coastal Federation:
“It all leaves the president with a delicious irony and that is: In order to garner support for a bill that is intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the administration is willing to expand the very substance that causes those emissions in the first place,” Mr. Tursi said. “Pandering for votes that rely on a polluting fuel of the past is not the kind of change many of us expected.”
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