U.S. Desperately Needs More Domestic Oil

Newsmax ^ | 5/12/08 | Humberto Fontova

[slickeroo]

For fear of oil spills, as of 2008, the U.S. federal government and various states ban drilling in thousands upon thousands of square miles off the U.S. coast. These areas, primarily on the outer Continental Shelf, hold an estimated 115 billion barrels of oil and 633 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This leaves America's energy needs increasingly at the mercy of foreign autocrats, despots, and maniacs. All the while worldwide demand for oil ratchets ever and ever upward. At times you'd swear that Che Guevara's bloody lesson (not to mention Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot's) has yet to sink in. Barack Obama, for instance, recently proposed a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies. Such "hope" that more federal looting of oil producers will lower prices is not "audacious", it is simply idiotic. And that's only part of the idiocy. For those who favor evidence over dogma, a lesson in the “environmental perils” of offshore oil drilling presents itself every bit as starkly, though much less murderously. To wit: Of the roughly 3,700 offshore oil productions platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, roughly 3,200 lie off the Louisiana coast. Yet Louisiana produces one-third of America's commercial fisheries and no major oil spill has ever soiled its coast.

[backhoe]