Oil, oil everywhere and not a well to sink, because of current US policies. John McCain came out for more drilling the other day, an utterly common sense thing that is overwhelmingly popular in the polls, and he has Dick Morris swooning at his superior political judgment to Obama. Standards in politics are low, apparently. But what about ANWR? In the course of complaining about Senator McCain’s inexplicable devotion to the remote, utterly unpopulated northern reach of Alaska we call ANWR, Charles Krauthammer reminds us of some history:

Gas is $4 a gallon. Oil is $135 a barrel and rising. We import two-thirds of our oil, sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the likes of Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. And yet we voluntarily prohibit ourselves from even exploring huge domestic reserves of petroleum and natural gas.

At a time when U.S. crude oil production has fallen 40 percent in the last 25 years, 75 billion barrels of oil have been declared off-limits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That would be enough to replace every barrel of non-North American imports (oil trade with Canada and Mexico is a net economic and national security plus) for 22 years.

That’s nearly a quarter-century of energy independence. The situation is absurd. To which John McCain is responding with a partial fix: Lift the federal ban on Outer Continental Shelf drilling, where a fifth of the off-limits stuff lies.

This is a change for McCain, but circumstances have changed. When the moratorium was imposed in 1982, gasoline was $1.20 and oil was $30 a barrel. Since the moratorium was instituted, we’ve had two wars in the Middle East, and in between a decade of garrisoning troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE to preserve the peace and keep untold oil riches out of the hands of the most malevolent of our enemies.

Technological conditions have changed as well. We now are able to drill with far more precision and environmental care than a quarter-century ago. We have thousands of rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, yet not even hurricanes Katrina and Rita resulted in spills of any significance.

Krauthammer makes the common sense case that what is true offshore should obviously be true for ANWR, and chides McCain for his inconsistent stance, and that brings us to whether MCain’s position is political or intellectual. For example, Paul Krugman thinks that Senator McCain’s change of heart on offshore drilling is the result of cynical political calculation: “I’m reasonably sure that Mr. McCain’s advisers realize that offshore drilling would do nothing for current gas prices. But they may believe that the public can be conned.” Krugman’s analysis and McCain’s obstinance to date on ANWR raise the question of whether ANWR poll-tests poorly among swing voters, or whether McCain’s stance is just uninformed and dumb. (UPDATE — the fellows at Powerline think McCain should stick to his guns on ANWR.)

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 5:25 am and is filed under General, MSM, Republicans, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.