An Environment Catastrophe In the Gulf But ANWAR is Safe

Monday, May 31, 2010

Oil spill culprits run deep | obama, oil, deep - Opinion - The Orange County Register

Here's my question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place? Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we've had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Krauthammer implies there is a downside to banning offshore drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the Alaskan wilderness. Doesn't he know that leftist policies have no downsides? The Left has repealed the laws of nature, they can:

- hobble the economy by cutting off energy resources and LOWER unemployment (thanks to all those windmill and solar panel jobs - ask Spain how that's working out for them)
- raise taxes to confiscatory levels on the most productive in our society without sapping their incentives to create wealth for the society
- give everyone in the nation access to free healthcare but not create massive shortages and rationing
- SPEND their way out of a debt crisis

Come on, Krauthammer, your thinking is so 19th century!