What The Left Can't Understand About Oil

Ever since the BP oil rig spill, the political left has been on the bandwagon to stop offshore drilling and, in fact, any drilling. Because of that, many are viewing this disaster as a godsend.

There have been immediate calls for more clean energy. People point to hybrids and electric as the means to get off imported oil. But, what the left can't seem to understand is that we have more than 200 million cars, boats, trains and planes that must use hydrocarbon fuels -- primarily derived from oil -- to operate. The average life of everyone of those cars is 9 years; including all those being sold today. As of this writing, hybrids only represent 3% of car sales with electric car sales being almost non-existent. That's because they're too expensive.

Further, while ethanol can somewhat reduce that dependency on oil-derived fuels, it doesn't address the fact the ethanol is very corrosive and it's application above 15% on anything other than an engine that was designed around the E85 standard can cause all kinds of expensive repair problems. Further, our increased use of corn to derive ethanol is placing a price hardship on all Americans. Since Congress has increased the use of ethanol in our fuels, the price of corn tripled from 2005 to mid-2008. Since then, the recession has forced the price of corn down but prices are still nearly 75% higher than in 2005.

The problem that America has is that, despite increases in fuel mileage and technology, our demand for oil keeps increasing in normal economic times. Only the recession has been able to temporarily abate the demand in the last two years. At same time, our oil production is declining and, now, it appears that, with this oil spill, any expanded domestic oil production is in jeopardy.

So, you figure it. If we have less domestic oil and more domestic demand, will we reduce or increase our dependency on foreign oil? Further, is having less environmentally aware and regulated countries drilling for our needed oil better for the world's overall environment? I don't think so. Would somebody please explain that to the political left! We need new sources of domestic oil in conjunction with new technologies in order to bridge the gap to an eventual migration to those new forms of energy. Otherwise, the increasing expense for gasoline continues to steal more and more money from every American; while sending billions to our enemies.

One last thing. Land-based drilling is a lot safer. I's pretty hard to fix a leak that is 5000 feet under water. Land based, non-ablaze, leaks can be stopped in short order. Yet, Obama has backed offshore drilling while blocking any drilling in Alaska or in the potential and massive 200,000 square mile oil fields of the Bakken formation located in Montana and North Dakota. Apparently, the left doesn't want ugly oil drilling, pipelines, and pumping equipment. Instead, they would prefer the attractiveness of thousands of 200 foot high wind turbines. This is insane. Literally, you might not be able to see the forest -- not for the trees -- but for the all Wind Turbines that are being built!