Oil, Oil Everywhere But Not a Drop to Drill

This is a drama that doesn't need to be. Politics has always been theater in which fact takes second stage to perception and reality is incidental. But the sad thing is that the press, who is supposed to thrive on fact has given way to opinion and innuendo and done this without shame.

Here are some facts that don't seem to matter.

We are sitting on a sea of oil. The known reserves in the Rocky Mountain region, off shore and in the ANWAR are enormous.

The time to bring oil to market by drilling is not ten years but two to five years, according to experts.

Pollution is not a big factor. Drilling is 99.9 % safe. According to the MMS the amount of seepage from natural causes is a hundred times the average spill rate from drilling.

Speculation is a factor but not a manipulative one. People speculate in a free economy all the time. To break the back of speculative price inflation all that is needed is the probability of increased supply from more drilling, not government regulation. All that would do would be to drive the markets from Chicago overseas.

The truth is that the Democratic Party is in the pocket of the extreme environmentalists, who want high oil prices to reduce the use of fossil fuel for their perception of reduced carbon, which they accept as an inviolate fact of global warming. This is in the face of increasing evidence, not that there is global warming, though this could be in doubt, but to what degree man influences it, and to what extent man can control it.

An example of this is the story recently from a prominent university research program of a new technique to remove a lot of the carbon from the burning of coal. The "Friends of the Cumberland Mountains" protested. They don't want clean coal they want no coal. What these environmentalist "whakos" want is for everyone but them to revert to the cave man status- though those were the most environmental unfriendly people of any.

So, the facts say drill now, drill often, and get independent.