All about oil

Let's just suppose gasoline prices hadn't soared to almost $5 a gallon a couple of months back. Suppose the price had held to, oh, $3.50 or $3.75 - not much lower than where they are today. Let's also suppose that we weren't in the middle of a presidential election, where the pandering of the ignorant and the self-absorbed knows no bounds. Suppose all that and then tell me that folks in Santa Barbara would still be talking about a return to oil drilling off their coast. A poll by the Public Policy Institute of California showed that 51 percent of Californians now approve of offshore drilling, a 10-point increase in a single year. The most recent capitulation comes from the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors, which voted 3-2 to support drilling, though it's Gov. Schwarzenegger who holds the cards. From the NYT:

The swing vote on the five-member board, Supervisor Brooks Firestone, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that he was ending his opposition because offshore drilling was no longer a significant threat to the coastal environment. “I did a lot of research that brought me to realize that 1969 can’t happen again,” Mr. Firestone said. He joined two supervisors who are longtime proponents of drilling in voting in favor of writing a letter asking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, to rethink his support for the Congressional moratorium on offshore drilling.

A lot of research? Does that include buying into the belief - well-fueled by the McCain folks, by the way - that new oil could be churning out of those fields and into refineries within months, maybe even weeks? (Can’t happen folks – you’re looking at many, many years.) This is a similar spin that had both Clinton and McCain pushing for a gas holiday earlier this summer. By the way, Firestone said during a nine-hour supes hearing that oil drilling would actually help the environment by limiting the amount of natural oil seeps. Too bad the fella who did the research testified that such conclusions were “unjustified and unwarranted extrapolations” of his work. Oops. From the Santa Barbara Independent:

Organizations like the Environmental Defense Center (EDC), Get Oil Out (GOO) and the Community Environmental Council (CEC)—all of whom were formed in the immediate wake of the 1969 Unocal spill—urged the supervisors to hold the anti-drilling line despite mounting industry and partisan pressures. “The problem is not that oil is too expensive” explained GOO President John Abraham Powell, “The problem is that we are addicted to oil. Everybody knows that when a junkie needs a fix they are dangerous and don’t make good decisions.”

Going back almost 40 years, the central problem hasn’t really changed. Voters are unwilling to have the government invest in developing alternative sources of energy – and for them to pay the bill – unless the price of gas jumps to a certain unacceptable level. Four bucks, five bucks, whatever. But for such long-term investment to work, it must transcend marketplace fluctuations. You can’t cut it off if the price of gasoline falls to $2.50. From the Independent:

For most of those opposed, the idea of more drilling is nothing but a politically motivated roadblock on the way to emerging alternative energy sources. As EDC Chief Counsel Linda Kop put it, “Think where we would be today if we had started looking at this 30 years ago when we had our oil crisis in the 1970s. If we had started moving away from oil then, think where we would be today.”