Re: “New oil-drilling sources needed now” by Don French (Beacon, July 24, page 6):
According to the House Natural Resources Committee Majority Staff report, those [oil-drilling] lands currently leased “have the potential to produce an additional 4.8 million barrels of oil and 44.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day, doubling the total U.S oil production, and increase natural gas production by 75 percent. It would also cut U.S. oil imports by more than one-third, reducing America’s dependency on foreign oil.”
Regardless, if there is no oil on the land currently leased, the new bill allows them to avoid the new lease prohibition by relinquishing their nonproducing leases. However, Mr. French is correct about the amount of red tape involved, and sometimes a decade will pass between finding and tapping the oil.
However, even the oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens has put out ads saying this is one crisis we cannot drill our way out of and that we need to depend more on solar and wind power for future energy sources. If a decade is worth waiting for oil, why don’t we start now on renewable resources instead ” something the Republicans have fought at every turn?
And isn’t it interesting that oil companies have made more profits during the Bush administration than any company has in the history of the world. And we, on the other hand, are paying the highest prices we’ve ever paid.
Had we started investing in alternative energy 25 years ago and weaning ourselves off oil, we wouldn’t have the situation we have today.
The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
And didn’t [Sen. John] McCain need to cancel his recent photo op on an oil rig because the 450,000 gallons of spilled oil would have provided an unfortunate backdrop?