Democrats Cave-In On Offshore Drilling

The_Toecutter · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Jun 18, 2005 Posts: 1736

Offshore drilling is only going to amount to a small fraction of today's oil consumption in the U.S. at the peak of its extraction 15-25 years after it is started...

...meaning, it's not going to do anything to lower gasoline prices and further risks making our oceans even more polluted.

The best solution is to use less oil. We have technology for electric cars with 200+ miles range and it would be affordable in mass production; we can have no-compromise 80 mpg midsize cars and 35 mpg full size SUVs with proper attention to aerodynamics; force the automakers to produce them immediately with their next model year or they can't sell cars here! They've already developed prototypes since the 1970s that were market ready, but never sold them. Given that the auto fleet turns over every 17 years, we'd cut our oil consumption by nearly 30% in that timeframe without any sacrifice just from changing our automobiles(and we could be doing plenty of that too).

Of course, this would have the side effect of saving Joe sixpack money and transferring less of his money to society's elite, therefore neither democrats nor republicans like the idea. They support more drilling and more oil use because it keeps us spending money, but the real problem is that we're spending/consuming too much. We can have the same living standard on less resources, but it means that a wealthy few won't be as wealthy.

Forget more drilling. It's a losing proposition because it does not address the underlying problem that we are consuming an irreplacable resource, and consuming far much more than we need to for a given living standard. We need a form of conservation that focuses on first and foremost saving the average American money and encouraging less spending.
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The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the old growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder. ~Thomas Jefferson

mos6507

3aidlillahi

skeptik

Windmills

Even if it were true, it's irrelevant. Assuming you're talking about abiotic oil, the point you're still missing is rates. The issue at the heart of peak oil is production rates. A few drops of oil being produced by whatever method is a ludicrous point to bring up compared to the rate at which oil is being consumed.

TheDude

This notion of a massive ban on offshore drilling is an obnoxious fiction.

From the MMS.
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Cogito, ergo non satis bibivi
The Dude Is Not In: Leave A Message After The Beep.

3aidlillahi

Windmills