Oil Drilling - What's Next?

The BP oil spill has already been covered by every possible media outlet, but there's still debate over what's next. First of all, the moratorium on new drilling is idiotic. It's like banning all commercial flights after a plane crash. Yes, BP's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and created all this disaster, but that doesn't mean that all BP rigs will explode, or that all the other oil companies (as well as their employees and mutual funds that own their stocks) should be punished. Today, a federal judge rightfully struck down the drilling moratorium.

We keep hearing about how we must stop our dependence on foreign oil - you can only reduce reliance on foreign oil by extracting domestic oil! Which brings us to the question that a lot of people are asking - why are we drilling a mile deep under the sea in the first place? The answer is very obvious - because of environmentalist and clueless politicians. It's much easier and more economically efficient to drill in shallow waters or on land (like in Alaska), plus there were no major accidents and no environmental disasters EVER resulting from shallow water or land drilling. But our federal Government has put all obstacles against that kind of oil exploration, so we can only drill where anyone is legally allowed to (including the Chinese and Russians) - a few miles farther off-shore in deep waters.

As blogger Art Gallagher found out, one of the reasons we're drilling at a mile deep is the Outer Continental Shelf Deep Water Royalty Relief Act (DWRRA) of 1995. And this is where our local "shore" Congressman Frank Pallone comes into play. He voted for DWRRA in 1995. Also, it's known by now that BP reported cracks in the sea floor as far back as February (2 months before the explosion), and the administration was informed. Among the responsible parties that were informed is the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, that Frank Pallone is a member of! Now Pallone is bragging about how much he cares about the Gulf, after he was part of the reason BP had to drill so dangerously, and he ignored all warnings because he was too busy with PalloneCare (aka ObamaCare, but he's an author of that bill too!)

So did anyone call Pallone on all this stuff? Of course, and that was his opponent Anna Little who said:

"The recent news that our federal government knew of serious problems with BP’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico as early as February, two months before the explosion that killed 11 people, caused billions of dollars in economic turmoil and unimaginable environmental damage is appalling. As a senior member of the congressional committee with oversight jurisdiction of these operations, Frank Pallone is culpable. It is appalling that our government, through the Minerals and Mining Service and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce could have and should have prevented this disaster, yet did nothing."

Little also said today at a campaign meeting that "All this happened on Pallone's watch, and now we need someone new in Congress to fix it." Let's hope there will be some change in Congress this November, before we go further down the Slippery Slope To Tyranny, as Thomas Sowell has called the Obama's administration's recent actions.