On Thursday President Obama complained that Republicans would be trying to take political advantage of the recent spike in gasoline prices (something the President would never do if the situation was reversed) and that the Republicans’ only energy plan was to “drill, drill, and keep drilling.”* Of course that’s not true, and the President knows it is not true, so I don’t know why he said it. But in any case, the fact that more drilling won’t solve the whole problem, doesn’t mean more drilling isn’t part of the solution.
But then Democrats also say that more drilling won’t help because it will take five years for the oil from the new drilling to reach the market. I could not tell whether President Obama used this line yesterday, but it is a common statement by anti-drilling Democrats (which is most of them).
In fact, I remember the Democrats using this argument in the summer of 2008 in response to Republican calls for more drilling at that time. President Bush wanted to allow more drilling on federal lands, but the Democrats wouldn’t allow it. We were visiting our daughter in Washington in August of that year. The Republicans in the House wanted to have a debate on energy – and on drilling. But Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House (but not a democratic Speaker of the House), wouldn’t allow it. She locked the doors of the House chamber and shut off all the lights (except emergency lighting), microphones, C-SPAN cameras, etc. She shut down everything she could. But that didn’t stop the Republicans. They let people enter the House chamber through the Republican cloakroom, the one door Speaker Pelosi couldn’t lock, and they talked to the American people about energy. And while the Republicans were talking about energy inside the House, the Democrats were outside saying how drilling wouldn’t help because it would take five years for the oil to get to market.
Well, that was three and one-half years ago. If we had started drilling then, the oil wouldn’t be here yet, but it would be here in the summer of 2013. And that is not all that long from now.
Obviously, more drilling won’t solve our energy problems by itself. But more drilling will reduce our dependence on foreign energy. And to the extent more oil comes from the United States (and other stable countries), the whole world will be better off.
Also, while starting more drilling today won’t do these things now, the quicker we start, the quicker they will happen. And if we never start, we will continue to be more dependent on foreign sources of oil than we need to be, and we will continue to be more dependent than necessary on places that nobody wants to be dependent on.
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* This is actually a paraphrase of what the President said. The full quote is as follows:
"‘You can bet that since it's an election year, they're already dusting off their three-point plans for $2 gas. I'll save you the suspense: Step one is to drill, step two is to drill, and step three is to keep drilling. ... We've heard the same thing for thirty years. Well, the American people aren't stupid.’"
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