On offshore drilling and Obama's position, smart electoral politics, but let's hope it never...

[Solon]

translates into policy in 2009 and beyond. I can understand the need for people to want a "quick fix" for the energy crisis, problem is there are no quick fixes. I can even understand Presidential candidates lying to the American people about this, I just hope they don't believe their own bullshit.

As many people have pointed out, any savings for us(and hence profits for oil companies) stemming from such offshore drilling is at least a decade away, and frankly, that's not a guarantee. Oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s, and since then, with the exponential explosion of technologies that allow for us to be much more accurate in finding oil, yet we haven't discovered oil at the same rate as we did leading up to the 1960s, indeed discoveries have been declining for over 40 years.

This push for offshore drilling is based on estimates, and while things are more accurate than they were in the 1960s, they aren't guaranteed, and even if they were, most of this potential oil simply isn't worth getting out of the ground in the first place. Its expensive to have offshore oil platforms, you have to maintain a crew on them, and ship everything either by air or by sea, and the platforms themselves are much more expensive than the ones on land.

Even if the platforms were already pumping this crap out of the ground now, at full capacity, it wouldn't be able to offset current demand, much less future demand. Its a fruitless exercise, and I would be surprised if the oil companies themselves would even invest all the money needed to actually fund this type of operation.

Indeed, it seems to me that the only way the oil companies can make a "profit" from such a venture would be to use taxpayer's money to fund at least part of it. Is it really worth it to invest billions of dollars of our money to lower gas prices a nickle or less a decade from now?

[LaPera]

1. I say fuck the greedy oil bastards. They already make $1600 in profits per minute and they want more

"They keep saying, "Gas will be cheaper if you let us ruin America's most pristine wilderness areas,"
but if we give in, they'll just raise the price to $6 a gallon and say, "We don't have a magic wand."

I say fuck the greedy oil bastards.
They already make $1600 in profits per minute and they want more.

We should call their bluff.

We should tell BIG OIL they can have ANWAR and off-shore both
if they guarantee us all the $2 gas we can guzzle by Christmas.

If they can't meet that goal, we nationalize the oil companies.
I'll bet gasoline would drop to $1.25 a gallon inside of 90 days.

They'll say, "Nationalizing the oil business would be socialism,"
but aren't we already drinking socialized water?

Aren't we policed by socialized cops?

Isn't socialized natural gas heating your home?

Isn't socialized electricity powering your home?

Isn't socialized mail what delivers letters from Grandma?
The list is endless.

We can't allow the oil bastards to bankrupt
what's left of our once-great country.


The crooked oil bastards will gouge us until somebody stops them.
They don't want unlimted money and power - they want it all."

bartcop.com

[Sancho]

2. I will have to say, that this is really, really a bad change in Obama's position...

it will cost him all the green votes in Florida and the GOP could swing the state on drilling alone. Personally, between the FISA vote and now oil drilling, my estimate among the Democratic candidates makes Obama less like my preference than several others who are no longer with us...I don't think this is smart politics in Florida at all.