You Know The Drill

I wish this were an April Fool's Day joke, but it's really true that President Obama is opening the waters off the southern Atlantic coast of the United States, parts of the Arctic Ocean, and the eastern Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil drilling. He says it will help the economy and produce more jobs. Did a Sarah Palin mole replace environmental employment expert Van Jones as a White House point man on energy policy?

President Obama defended his decision as being part of a wider picture, saying that the United states needs to consider all possible energy sources -not just renewable ones - as part of a broad strategic plan to make itself independent of foreign energy sources. But what's to be gained from going from a dependence on foreign oil to a dependence on domestic oil? It's still more of a dependence on oil, and it gives us an excuse to continue an oil-based living pattern, encouraging more cars, more large cars and SUVs, more pollution, and more suburban sprawl. We don't need more oil. We need more biofuels, solar power, wind power, and, if there really is such a thing as clean coal, more of that. The jury is still out on natural gas.

We don't need the sprawl more oil will encourage, but rather, more walkable neighborhoods and towns. We need more mass transit, more small cars, and a gasoline tax to encourage such a living pattern. This decision by the President will just make our suburban lifestyle, with all of the driving and petrochemically grown foodstuffs that support it, last a little longer.

Many Democratic lawmakers, such as Senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, are opposed to this plan, afraid of oil spills polluting their states's beaches. Southern politicians support it, even those from would-be affected Southern coastal states. Good, I hope they get gobs of oil on their private beaches. To be fair, President Obama excluded the pristine Bristol Bay off the southwestern coast of Alaska and all of the Pacific coastline of the continental U.S. (which includes the Democratic states of Washington, Oregon, and California). The President sought to strike a balance in the quest for a compromise. But as the deals over the extension of slavery proved, compromises usually resolve nothing. They just perpetuate bad situations that can erupt into something worse.

Isn't there anyone advising the President on a green economy right now? Not likely. If there were, Glenn Beck would have hounded him out of office just like he did to Van Jones.