Offshore drilling is not the answer to high gas prices

There have been a lot of discussions about the high gas prices in USA the past months and what exactly should be done to curb this trend. Some politicians, like McCain, Bush, and Gingrich, are taking advantage of the situation and tries to push for the ending of a 27-year moratorium on offshore drilling along the coastlines of USA.

But offshore drilling is not a “quick fix” and it won’t help to lower the gas prices. The only ones that will profit from this are Bush and McCain’s friends in the oil industry. While people are suffering from the high gas prices the oil companies are reporting record profits after record profits.

Greenpeace has listed a bunch of reasons why offshore drilling is not the answer to high gas prices at the pump:

“The United States burns 24 percent of the world’s oil, yet we only have 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves. Even if we drilled every drop of oil the U.S. has on shore or off its coasts, we will never be able to drill our way to lower oil prices or energy security. We simply burn more than we could ever drill.”

“Offshore oil drilling is not a short-term fix. It would take at least a decade to bring new leases into production. And, it will be years before exploration could begin and years after that before production would start. If any effect were to be felt on gas prices (most likely only a few pennies per gallon), that effect is decades away.”

“Offering up more of our coastline for drilling won’t lower gas prices. Since President Bush took office in 2000, the number of wells in federally leased areas has increased exponentially, yet gas prices have doubled during that same time. Yet, this type of evidence is never mentioned in the media or by proponents for offshore drilling.”

“Another reason that drilling for more oil in the U.S. won’t result in lower gas prices is because oil prices are set on the global oil market. What this means is that all oil produced around the world is sold all at the same price. There is no guarantee that we would even be using the oil that was drilled here in the U.S. And, we certainly wouldn’t get a discount just because we drilled for it on U.S. soil. We would pay the same rate as the rest of the world.”

The only things that will lower the fuel prices, create more jobs, solve the climate crisis and fix this fragile economy is to invest in clean renewable energy sources, setting strict mpg standards for all automobiles and transform our current society to a sustainable one.

Going green will fix many problems, one of them are high gas prices.

Simon Leufstedt is the editor of Green Blog. Simon has previously studied Global Environmental Justice and is currently studying Human Ecology and Political Science at Lund University in Sweden. Simon is also blogging over at the Swedish 350 website and working with the Swedish TckTckTck organisation. You can follow Simon on Twitter and on Google+.
View all posts by Simon Leufstedt →