FreedomTalks

Here’s an interesting statistic: According to the latest Gallup poll, a majority of Americans support Congress allowing oil companies to drill in U.S. coastal and wilderness areas now off limits. With oil prices hovering around $4 a gallon in most parts of the country, this is hardly a surprise. Worldwide demand is on the rise, so the only way to make a long-term dent in the price of oil is to increase supply. The editors at NRO agree:

if members of Congress really want to mitigate the effects of high oil prices as much as they claim they do, they could start by letting oil companies bring America’s vast untapped supplies to market.

We’re not just talking about the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) — which Congress stupidly keeps off-limits even though proposed oil exploration there would only affect approximately 2,000 of its 19 million acres — though opening just that 0.01 percent of ANWR to oil and natural gas development could supply 5 percent of America’s oil per year for 12 years before it starts to decline, according to Energy Department estimates. The Outer Continental Shelf — also off-limits to drilling — likely contains billions of barrels of additional oil and natural gas reserves.

Of course, none of this seems to have gotten through to some members of Congress, who insist on trying to pin gas prices on oil executives even as the public’s belief that oil companies are to blame has dropped sharply. The solution here is simple: more oil, lower prices.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 8:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.