We’ve Got to Drill

We’ve got a problem: We need money to live. To get the money, we have to work. To work, there have to be jobs.
One place where we are losing a lot of jobs is in the fortunes we send out of the country to buy oil. There was a day when we produced most of the oil we consumed. That is no longer the case. We now import 12,000,000 barrels of oil every day. In trying to get my head around how much money that is, I looked up the current price of a barrel of oil, $71.50, multiplied that by 12,000,000, and got $858,000,000. (Bear with me a minute)
I then multiplied that by 365 days in a year and got $313,000,000,000, or $313 billion. It is all just numbers, though, until we put it into context. Here is the context.
Last week President Obama promised to move quickly to reopen offshore oil and gas exploration, against enormous opposition from his party. Why did he do this? The answer is simple; life brings with it certain realities, and one of those realities is the need for money.
In spite of the oil spill, the people in the Gulf region, angry over the loss of jobs, are screaming for a lifting of the drilling moratorium. We are talking about 35,000 to 40,000 jobs. If the economy had been steaming along, the anti-drilling folks might have been able to continue to stonewall; but, 10 percent unemployment forced his hand. Yes, we must find ever-safer ways to drill, but we must do it.
The fact is, we are at the stage in this nation where we are ever less willing to listen to arguments which stand in the way of our employment. It would be nice if we were all employed and we had all the energy we needed at a reasonable price; but, that is not the case.
The reality is, we need those $300 billion for American jobs, and our government needs the taxes on those jobs.
Last week we ran Sen. Bob Menendez’s op-ed column calling for a total ban on drilling near the Jersey Shore. Sounds good; why not? In a perfect world, but life has trade offs. Likewise, it would be good if we could save 34,000 lives a year, and all we would have to do would be to stop car accidents by banning cars. But those deaths are a high price we pay for our lifestyle.
He says we need to invest in clean energy; who can be against that? Problem is, such energy generally costs a lot more to produce. If we have to pay a lot more for it, we will end up using a lot less of it. The fact is, we like our abundance, our larger cars and houses relative to the rest of the world.
I believe that we would rather search for ways to continue to live the American dream of having jobs and paying taxes, than to be shoe-horned into a limited lifestyle. To the degree that this might be unwise and damaging to our environment, let the unvarnished facts be laid before the American people.
I trust the people to collectively deal wisely with the issues before us. I hate to say it, but I no longer trust our politicians in Washington, D.C. to do so. I fear that they are more beholden to their campaign contributors and special interest groups than to us, and lead us around by the nose like little children.
ART HALL, publisher
.