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EDITORIAL: Open Areas to Drilling to Fight High Gas Prices

Posted on: Friday, 7 October 2005, 15:00 CDT

By Appeal-Democrat, Appeal-Democrat, Marysville, Calif.

Oct. 7--Many environmentalists are disturbingly gleeful at the high cost of gasoline.

They use the higher prices to advocate for their favored policies: conservation, smaller cars, public transit, slow growth, population limits and other policies designed to promote a new era of limits.

"We as environmentalists should be encouraging people to turn to bicycles, transit, restoration of nature, innovative green architecture and city design that makes it possible to walk most places you want to go," writes an official with an environmentalist group known as the Post-Carbon Institute, taking issue with those environmentalists who are only pushing for more-efficient cars.

Some environmentalists would have us believe that the world is running out of oil, and that explains the higher prices. They peddle a doom-and-gloom scenario designed to scare Americans into embracing their anti-growth and Luddite-style policies.

Fortunately, some in Congress understand that gasoline price volatility, including the price spikes in the wake of the disruption of oil supplies after Hurricane Katrina, is best discouraged by reducing the many restrictions on oil exploration in the United States and off our coastlines. According to published reports, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, is pushing legislation that would open up federal waters off the California and Atlantic coasts to oil drilling, loosening a federal ban passed in 1981 and expanded in 1985. The legislation would also provide incentives for drilling in the Rocky Mountains.

"While this may help their cronies in the auto and oil industries," argued the Sierra Club, "it won't reduce the effect of future disruptions. ... The solution is making our cars, SUVs and other light trucks go farther on a gallon of gas."

Actually, the policies advocated by Pombo will help the millions of Americans for whom gasoline-fueled vehicles remain the most economical and convenient method of transportation - especially if producers are allowed to develop new sources. More fuel-efficient vehicles (which, by the way, are lighter and more dangerous than heavier "gas-guzzlers") will make their way into the marketplace when the market is ready for them.

Columnist Walter Williams, writing in Human Events newspaper, notes that "the U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are about 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil in ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge]. But environmentalists' hold on Congress has prevented us from drilling for it. They've also had success in restricting drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off the shore of California. ... Because of environmentalists' successful efforts, it's been 30 years since we've built a new oil refinery."

Congress should open drilling to new areas rather than artificially limiting the supplies of oil to assuage the concerns of environmentalists, who are more interested in promoting changes in societal behavior than in meeting the realistic transportation needs and choices of a growing society.

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Copyright (c) 2005, Appeal-Democrat, Marysville, Calif.

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Source: Appeal-Democrat

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