The strange 7-year moratorium on oil drilling
A professor at the University of Illinois criticized the seven year moratorium on offshore drilling:
“It’s a ridiculous decision on the part of the Interior Department,” said John W. Kindt, a professor of business and legal policy at Illinois. “The previous 180-day moratorium really hurt a lot of businesses. Well, a seven-year ban is going to sting even more.”
Kindt says giving the oil companies a public spanking through a seven-year ban isn’t going to solve our energy problems, and that unreasonably prohibiting offshore drilling will not only exacerbate the region’s economic woes, it also will strengthen U.S. dependence on foreign oil…”We have two wars in the Middle East, and while we do need alternate sources of energy, in the interim we still need to safely develop our off-shore resources. That means we need to open up both the East Coast and California for drilling, although California is not going to like that. But we’ve got to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.”
According to Kindt, the author of “Marine Pollution and the Law of the Sea,” a six-volume series that examines protecting the world’s oceans while encouraging development of essential resources, the real villain in the new contretemps is not BP (formerly British Petroleum), but the Department of the Interior, with the recently announced seven-year moratorium serving as yet another example of what he says is the department’s shortsightedness and incompetence. “The real issue is the Interior Department, which is the most scandal-ridden agency in American history,” he said.
Two years ago oil was almost $150 a barrel. Nothing was done.
The US imports about 12 million barrels of oil a day. If oil costs $100 a barrel, and the US became self-sufficient, we’d lower the balance of payments deficit by around $400 billion a year. That’s wishful thinking, but even $100 or $200 billion a year is real money. If we improve incrementally in industry after industry, we just might get out of this mess.