No sooner did President Bush lift the executive ban on oil exploration in the outer Continental Shelf than Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi put the kibosh to its prospects.
"The only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil resources is action from the U.S. Congress," said President Bush last week.
"The president of the United States, with gas at $4 a gallon because of his failed energy policies, is now trying to say that is because I couldn't drill offshore," quickly countered the speaker. "That is not the cause, and I am not going to let him get away with it."
A recent CNN (no less!) poll showed more than 73 percent of Americans in favor of offshore drilling. But the House speaker can keep the issue from even reaching a vote, and Ms Pelosi seems heck-bent on just that.
"(In California) we learned the hard way that oil and water do not mix on our coast," she said back in 1996. Ms Pelosi was referring, of course, to the famous Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, an event that serves as the Alamo of the anti-drilling cause.
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Webster's defines a "provincial" as: "a person of local or restricted interests or outlook," not a term the media uses for a San Franciscan millionaire feminist legislator who owns vineyards and a French-monikered resort.
Then what else to call Nancy Pelosi (and most of her wealthy constituents)? A freakish, long-ago and very localized accident with no fatalities, and involving (by today's standards) primitive technology finds them ridden with superstitions against offshore oil drilling surpassing those of a Papuan savage against a volcano that once erupted, as recalled by village elders. Worse, given the vagaries of legislative politics, the superstitions of these San Franciscan yokels (one who happens to be speaker of the House) puts a chokehold on the fuel for America's economy.
Imagine the caterwauling if the views of a legislator from rural Mississippi determined the status of gay marriage in San Francisco. But San Franciscans' views on procuring energy affect practically every facet of a Mississippian's (and the rest of Americans') lives.
Today's drilling technology compares to the one used only 20 years ago about like the Kitty Hawk compares to a jumbo jet. The one that gave us the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 compares to today's like a fossil. Market forces, not meddlesome bureaucrats, account for cleaner, safer oil drilling. Today, a deep-water drilling rig costs half a billion dollars a day to rent. A blowout and spill would negate such a gigantic investment. No oil company could long stay in business that way.
As it happened, no people died during that extremely freakish accident off Santa Barbara while an oil company procured the very lifeblood of America's economy. But some beachfront homeowners were discomfited (and fully compensated by oil firm UNOCAL), and the aesthetic sensibilities of many California greenies were temporarily traumatized. Supposedly, 3,600 seabirds also perished.
Heck, the log at our duck-hunting camp shows my chums, my family and myself responsible for more dead birds.
Not that the Santa Barbara spill did not leave some lasting damage. The first Earth Day followed closely on its heels, a carnival of idiocy that plagues us to this day. The greenie caterwauling and henpecking also drove a harried President Nixon to finally sign the bill creating the monstrous Environmental Protection Agency, among the most henpeckish of all federal agencies even today. Watergate was a trifle compared to this crime.
The current brouhaha over federal regulations on offshore drilling just happens to coincide with one over federal regulations on offshore fishing, resulting (even if unwittingly) in more evidence in favor of the former, and against the environmentalist superstitions that block it. Federal regulators have recently divined that in the Gulf of Mexico, red snapper are "overfished" and these fish stocks "collapsing."
A recent scientific study by Dr Bob Shipp, professor at the Marine Sciences department of the University of South Alabama, makes hash of the feds' claims. The feds, it turns out, omit from their "estimates" the red snapper that swarm around the 4,000 oil-production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico! "The Red snapper catch changed radically in the 1950s (when the first offshore oil platforms went up off Louisiana.)," starts Dr Shipp's study. "More recently, the red snapper catch from the northwestern Gulf (Louisiana, with it's oil platforms) is estimated at 6 to 7 times greater than the catch from the eastern Gulf (Florida, without oil platforms.)"
It gets even better: "Oil platforms as artificial reefs support fish densities 10 to 1,000 times that of adjacent sand and mud bottom, and almost always exceed fish densities found at both adjacent artificial reefs and natural hard bottom. Evidence indicates that massive areas of the northwestern Gulf of Mexico were essentially empty of snapper stocks for the first hundred years of the fishery. Subsequently, areas in the western Gulf have became the major source of red snapper, concurrent with the appearance of thousands of petroleum platforms."
Today, Louisiana produces one-third of America's commercial fisheries. The oil production platforms off the Bayou state's coasts also produce 80 percent of the oil and 72 percent of the natural gas produced in the U.S., without causing a single major oil spill in half a century of this process. This record stands despite dozens of hurricanes – including the two most destructive in North American history, Camille and Katrina– repeatedly battering the drilling and production structures.
The total impact – from payroll, to fees for contractors and vendors, etc. – on Louisiana's economy from the oil industry nears $70 billion – $1.5 billion of this is looted by the state as taxes and royalties, straight into its coffers.
Hear that, Ms. Pelosi? This type of plunder against the private sector just might sway Democrats. So let's get cracking and start drilling – and fishing.