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June 27, 2008

Exclusive: Get Off Your Duff, America: Drill Here, Drill Now

Pam Meister

I've heard a lot of complaining about the price of gas these days. Heck, I'm part of the chorus! The cheapest per gallon price of gasoline in my area is currently $4.33, and who knows when that will creep closer to $5?

What's interesting to note is that I haven't seen much of a reduction in the cars on the road. The street I live on is off of a busy two-lane highway, and during certain times of the day you can hear me cursing as I wait up to five minutes (sometimes longer) to make a left-hand turn out of my street. Saturday morning is prime time for driving as citizens run errands or head off to more interesting destinations. Many of these cars only have one person in them, and many of them are large SUVs. So how seriously are people taking the current gas price crisis?

One thing did jump out at me a couple of weeks ago when I went to pick up a pizza for a quick Friday night dinner. The restaurant where my family prefers to get pizza usually has a line out the door on Friday and Saturday nights. The other night, there was no line and not all of the tables were occupied. A few days later we went to a diner for dinner, and there were only two other occupied tables. Now this is hardly a scientific survey but from my casual observations, it would seem that some have decided that dining out is one way they can ease the burden being placed on their pocketbooks by rising gas prices.

Believe me, I'm not for telling people what kind of car they must drive or forcing them to carpool. As long as you can afford to pay for the gas, you should be allowed to buy as much as you'd like and burn as much as you'd like. But something's gotta give, and as I noted above, people are beginning to make decisions regarding their money as it relates to the price of gas. And as they curtail their spending on things like restaurant meals and other activities that might not be necessary but nonetheless give us pleasure, business owners will begin to feel the pinch, possibly causing layoffs and worse, closure. And so a vicious cycle begins.

The villain in all of this, of course, is the oil industry. Their enormous profits have become a target by certain politicians and a windfall tax is being proposed on oil profits. Yet the federal tax on a gallon of gas is about twice what the profit the oil companies collect. And bear in mind that an industry that has an enormous output will of course have proportionally large profits. But don't tell that inconvenient truth to those politicians who never met a tax they didn't like. So when can we start taxing the windfall tax? After all, it's the oil companies who do all the exploration, extraction, refining and transportation. The government collects a fee for doing zip.

The ecomonious ("ecological" + "sanctimonious"...I just coined the phrase but feel free to use it) among us would have you believe that this is a good thing. We've been told that "we can't drill our way out of this" and that we must begin exploring alternative sources of fuel. That's all well and good, but we've been hearing that line since the mid-1970s, when Jimmy Carter told us to all put on sweaters and stop whining for the common good. Thing is, there are other clean alternative energy sources available - the main one being nuclear energy. But we're told that nuclear power is off limits as well by the same people who are telling us that drilling for oil is bad.

Now it pains me to say this, but we might look to France (phew, my head didn't explode!) as an example of how successful nuclear power can be. France gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear power plants. Have you heard about any core meltdowns or radiation poisoning there? I thought not. But the greens in this country would have you believe that the nuclear power plants we have are the next Chernobyl waiting to happen. I find the idea of looking to France's example much more appealing than the idea that Americans would be as pathetic at managing a nuclear power plant than the hapless Soviets, who couldn't get anything right except long lines. (Our Three Mile Island incident was much less serious than we were led to believe at the time.)

Yet usually when Americans (and you know who they are) talk about emulating Europe, they mean some of Europe's less charming aspects like socialized medicine and higher minimum wage laws. The inimitable Thomas Sowell recently discussed what he calls "the imitators." And as you might guess, while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it isn't always a good thing. Just think of all the Elvis imitators roaming about the country and you'll see what I mean.

Just this week some acquaintances of mine were discussing gas prices and as one of them had just gotten back from a trip to England, he was asked what the Brits are paying for gas (or petrol, as they call it). We were told they're paying the equivalent of $9 a gallon. What was the general feeling after learning this? "We have nothing to complain about," said one man sagely, while everyone else but me nodded in agreement.

What? We sure can complain! The Brits might accept paying close to $10 per gallon of gas (just like they accept not being able to find a dentist on the national health plan and end up pulling their own teeth), but Americans won't, especially when we can drill right here in the U.S. Why pay big bucks to the Middle East (when some of that money might be used to fund terror activities) when we can pay American concerns and employ American citizens while doing it? The environmental impact isn't nearly as disastrous as the greens would have you think, either, as Linda Chavez notes:

When the original ban on drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf was enacted in the early 1980s, oil exploration at sea was a far riskier business. Advances in technology have now made it possible to explore for oil in ways that are less damaging to the environment, protect delicate coral reefs, and reduce the chance of environmentally disastrous oil spills. But the ban on exploration remains in place as if drilling today were no different than it was a quarter century ago. Estimates are that offshore drilling could produce about 18 billion barrels of oil, but we won't really know until we launch full-scale exploration.

What is it about? Power. There are people who want you to make sacrifices when it comes to energy consumption while they continue to consume more than you do...but because they buy "carbon credits" and engage in other silly schemes that assuage the guilt they feel, they can continue to look down their collective noses at the rest of us. (But don't ask them to put alternative power sources in their backyards and spoil their view.) These are the people who want to make decisions about energy policy that will affect us for decades to come. It's this kind of thinking that led to the upcoming moratorium on incandescent light bulbs in favor of the more expensive, mercury-filled bulbs that merit EPA guidelines on how to dispose of them and how to clean them up should they break.

I'm all for finding viable, economically sound alternative energy resources, but our economy demands that we do something without delay. Drill here, drill now. Once we've dealt with the immediate crisis we can look to the future. Unless, of course, you enjoy paying through the nose not only at the pump, but also for utilities and at the grocery store and other retail outlets - because everything will be affected sooner or later. And not just the "big, evil oil companies."

Pam Meister is the editor for Family Security Matters.

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