“ITS TIME TO DRILL”
At 10:30 a.m., President Bush will be making an announcement urging congress that enough is enough, and the U.S. needs to start offshore drilling. If congress were to pass this, it would lift a 27 year ban of American drilling off the coastline.
“The president believes Congress shouldn’t waste any more time,” White House press secretary Dana Perino told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “He will explicitly call on Congress to … pass legislation lifting the congressional ban on safe, environmentally friendly offshore oil drilling.”
With the increasing price of gas, now averaging over $4 a gallon, more and more support is being shown by the American people.
On Monday, GOP presidential candidate John McCain made lifting the federal ban on offshore oil and gas development a key part of his energy plan. McCain said states should be allowed to pursue energy exploration in waters near their coasts and get some of the royalty revenue.
Here is what Presidential Candidate Barack Obama and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson had to say about drilling:
the Democratic candidate for president, opposes lifting the ban on offshore drilling and says that allowing exploration now wouldn’t affect gasoline prices for at least five years.
Obama also said there is “no way that allowing offshore drilling would lower gas prices right now. At best you are looking at five years or more down the road.”
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, energy secretary during the Clinton administration, called it “another bad idea.”
“It’s going to take 10 years to fully get that oil out of the ocean. It’s a fragile ecosystem,” he said on CBS’s “The Early Show.”
What is our country suppose to do then? Should we just throw up our arm and say “oh well, we cant do anything about the price OPEC charges.” Even if it were to take a few years to see the results of our drilling, it is a start towards our initiative to become energy dependent. The next step now is to begin the construction of refineries. It has been over 30 years since a refinery has been built in the U.S.
3 Responses to ““ITS TIME TO DRILL””
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I find it amazing that Democrats say we cant drill our way out and at the same time want to sure OPEC and the Saudis to get them to drill more.
Here is a map off people planning or drilling just offshore from Florida. Do the democrats think that China and Cuba will respect the environment? They don’t even respect their own
Uhm… ok. So Bush 2 wants to undo the off-shore drilling laws enacted by his father (Bush 1)? You heard me, it was Bush 1 that put those into effect.
And lets not fool anyone. This isn’t about Florida or the gulf coast. It’s about ANWAR. They could get permission to drill in the gulf tomorrow, and they’d still be bitching because ANWAR isn’t divvied up yet. It has nothing do to with drilling. It’s all about the leasing.
And even if there are 8B barrels of oil under ANWAR (which is the highest pie-in-the-sky estimate), thats enough to run America for at most, 2 years, excluding the war in Iraq. There’s over twice that proven to exist in the National Petroleum Reserve which Bush 2 is still not tapping.
Not to mention the 10,000 existing leases already held by the major oil companies, mainly on US land. Some of those (about 3,000) have been drilled and tapped, and are sitting the the portfolios of the oil industries as “reserves”. As for the rest, the oil companies cry that “it takes time to explore for oil”. The same argument that most pro-drilling folks use. But this only shows they don’t need ANWAR. If they don’t have enough people to search for and drill for oil on 6,000+ existing (again, mainly land-based) leases, how will they have enough to explore and drill in ANWAR or on any costal area?
They don’t want to start drilling ANWAR, they just want to dish out the leases for ANWAR so they can add it to their stock portfolios to make their prices rise.
Want to know the real scoop? Happy reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/business/21royalty.html
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10633.html
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S._federal_oil_and_gas_royalties
http://www.gao.gov/docsearch/abstract.php?rptno=GAO-08-792R
http://feinstein.senate.gov/06releases/r-royalty-relief629.htm
It’s a lot of reading. I’m sure you’ll find answers here and I’m sure you won’t like many of them.