I recently posted a blog called “Hey Obama – Lift the Ban!”. Before I hit the Publish key, I was already hearing, in my head, my liberal friends quoting Barack’s arguments about drilling offshore:
“It won’t produce oil for 10 years or more” and “Even if we drill, it won’t affect the price of gas much”. However, like most of Obama’s positions on the global warming, the success of the surge, capital gains taxes, etc., you have to conclude either his judgement is poor or he’s not telling the truth to American voters.
For example, let’s take his argument that “drilling offshore may not produce oil until 2030″ or 20 years from now. The fact is some areas off the coast of Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico (where there is existing infrastructure), can start producing oil in about two years. In addition, oil futures trade on trends and announcing that the US will finally start dumping millions barrels of oil per day on the world market in a few years will push the price down, significantly. Even though we have only 3% of the world’s reserves, we can have a big impact on the price if we can just increase the world supply enough that it is a couple million barrels per day more than current world demand (currently about 86 mil bbls/day). I know this is a little complex but a presidential candidate in 2008 should be all over this. Why doesn’t Obama understand this? I think he does understand so my next question is, why is he lying to American voters?
He also says that, even if the ban is lifted, it will “not have any effect on gas prices”. Well, there are about 86 billion barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf and 14 billion in ANWR and the promise of billions more once drilling starts. That may yield a couple million barrels per day. Democrats in Congress recently passed H.R. 6022, sponsored by my own Peter Welch (D-VT). It required Bush to stop buying 70,000 barrels/day for the SPR. Democrats proudly proclaimed that this “may reduce gas prices 5 to 24 cents per gallon”. All Senate Democrats, including Obama, voted for that bill. If 70,000 barrels a day will reduce gas prices by about 15 cents per gallon, does he really believe a couple million extra barrels of US oil won’t affect the price of gas at all?
Of course not! Obama knows drilling will lower gas prices significantly, perhaps $2 per gallon, so the question is why is he lying to us? Perhaps he wants us to suffer so much we’ll vote for “Change”? That sounds dreadful. Maybe he just wants the price of gas to stay up high enough, and long enough, for alternative energy sources to become competitive? That seems more likely. Why doesn’t he come out and say that? Because if he did, no one would vote for him and winning this election is very important to Obama.
Personally, I’d rather have cheap gas and cheap food again and Obama can go back to the Senate.
