With gasoline prices cresting the four dollar mark, President Bush is asking Congress to revoke the federal ban on offshore drilling.  The Democrats predictably refused and chose to offer up a bunch of anti-capitalist clap chap as their rationale.  My only question to Bush is: why not do this when your party controlled Congress?

I’m not completely sold on expanding production myself.  Our nation is, in fact, addicted to oil and the only way an alternative source of energy will be found is for high prices to stimulate market efforts to find the best replacement(s).  Expanding production could kill or harm the efforts of private venture capital investments in new energy - especially if some global event caused demand to drop and prices fell through the floor.

On the other hand, oil is a very good energy source for a number of reasons and it will be difficult to find anything better (let alone anything almost as good).  It has good energy density, portability, and the head start of an expansive infrastructure to support its use.  It doesn’t make much sense to leave known reserves of such a high quality source of energy just sitting underground while energy prices batter us and the market labors to find a suitable alternative, which may take a very long time.  I’m inclined to support expanding production, but it is a decision that should not be rushed or made out of political expediency.

The Democrats offered up their own “solution” to high oil prices: nationalize oil refineries.  Yeah, that should work out just great.  Do we still have to call them Democrats or can we just dispense with the formality and call them socialists?  The line of separation gets thinner every day.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Communism/Socialism, Energy. 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. Please note the copyright policy.