The Washington Post Debunks Domestic Drilling “Truths”
Posted by Brett Bittner on August 13, 2008
Perhaps Pelosi and the House Democrats were inspired by this lovely machine.
Surprisingly, an editorial made it past the decidedly liberal Washington Post staff that debunks three of the highly touted “truths” about domestic drilling for oil in the ANWR and the outer Continental Shelf. Certainly, domestic drilling is not the comprehensive solution to the energy problems America faces, but it can certainly help to ease the pain at the pumps nationwide. The highlights are below, with the entire column found here.
Drilling is pointless because the United States has only 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves. This is a misleading because it refers only to known oil reserves.
[...]
The oil companies aren’t using the leases they already have. According to the MMS, there were 7,457 active leases as of June 8. Of those, only 1,877 were classified as “producing.”
[...]
Drilling is environmentally dangerous. Opposition to offshore drilling goes back to 1969, when 80,000 barrels of oil from an offshore oil well blowout washed up on the beaches of Santa Barbara. In 1971, the Interior Department instituted a host of reporting requirements (such as the resource development and oil spill recovery plans mentioned above) and stringent safety measures.
After reading the article, it calls into question the stall on the part of Nancy Pelosi and her ilk, whose plan for energy still seems to be “drive a tiny car and wait for wind.”
