Expand Offshore Oil Drilling

There's an article at Bloomberg today called "Halt U.S. Offshore Drilling After BP Oil Spill."The author, Michael Brune, is a member of the Sierra Club, so it's not like he supported offshore drilling before this accident. But let's see what he says.

The death of 11 oil workers and the devastation of the Gulf Coast’s ecosystems and economy by the toxic sludge gushing from a BP Plc accident site is a tragedy that may well change the course of our nation.

By that he means cutting back on our domestic energy exploration. Let's hope not.

Americans are horrified.

I'm not horrified. Accidents happen. There have been very few major offshore oil accidents. There's no reason to panic and shut everything down because of one bad accident.

Leaders who had been willing to give offshore drilling the benefit of a doubt have abruptly changed their minds, including California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said he no longer supports a plan to allow limited drilling for oil off his state’s coast.

Schwarzenegger is a typical weasel politician. He wasn't that enthusiastic about drilling to begin with, and now he's seized on this accident to change his position, almost certainly because he thinks that's the way the political wind is blowing in California.

They’re right. There is no safe way to drill for oil in oceans.

There's no completely safe way to do almost anything. No matter how many precautions you take, accidents can still happen. The rest of the article is the usual utopian nonsense about our "clean energy future," and a call for more big government intervention.

In reality, there is no replacement for fossil fuels in the near or even readily foreseeable future. We should definitely be working on gradually shifting toward cleaner forms of energy, including a major expansion of nuclear power, something the Sierra Club opposes, even though it's the only proven large scale alternative energy source. But even as we work toward bringing cleaner sources of power online, we will need more, not less oil, since our energy demands continue to grow. For various well-known reasons, domestic oil sources are preferable to over-reliance on foreign suppliers.  The vast majority of the U.S. is not willing to sacrifice its standard of living and damage the economy to satisfy radical environmentalists like members of the Sierra Club. In direct contrast to what the Michael Brunes of the country think, the U.S. should not pretend that we can somehow make a quick switch away from fossil fuels. The U.S. government should ignore environmentalist hysteria and overreaction to an accident, expand offshore drilling, and build more refineries. We need the oil and gas.