Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that John McCain has been calling for offshore drilling. Barack Obama has also stated that he would support offshore drilling as a part of a compromise energy plan. Either way, it appears very unlikely that the next president will reinstate the executive order banning offshore drilling. Fortunately, the Congressional ban is still in place, and each state can also control drilling off of its own coast, so Americans are not likely to see more offshore oil rigs any time soon.
Unfortunately, the real damage of the campaign rhetoric is that it serves to reinforce the belief that the U.S. has significant untapped oil resources. According to the linked Time magazine article, this belief is just plain wrong. A few of the more salient points:
- Drilling in ANWR would trim the price of gas by 3.5 cents a gallon by 2027.
- Opening up offshore areas to oil exploration might cut the price of gas by 3 to 4 cents a gallon at most.
- The U.S. has an estimated 3% of global petroleum reserves but consumes 24% of the world's oil.
All told, the currently protected areas probably contain about 75 billion barrels of oil. In 2004, the U.S. consumed an estimated 20 million barrels a day. Thus, the only significant "positive" effect of offshore drilling would be to allow us to extend our dependence on petroleum for something less than 10 years.
The claim is that this would allow more time to invest in alternative energy research and development. This is a fallacy, though, because serious investment in alternative energy won't begin until the economic conditions are right. We are on the verge of those conditions now, but if we give the energy companies the option of continuing to make profits by doing what they are already doing for another 10 years instead of researching alternative energy, they will.
When everything is said and done, the net effect of allowing offshore drilling will be to add 10 more years worth of pollution to our environment and to pass the real problem on to yet another generation.
