Of course, it's not
While I think John Linder's editorial about domestic oil drilling is misguided, short-sighted and just exacerbates a problem rather than fixes it, what's most ridiculous about it is that one of its key lines of argument - that China drills off the Cuban coast - is it's completely false.
There is no evidence to support this claim - particularly since Cuba does not possess any refinery capabilities - yet Linder feels it necessary to parrot this falsehood to support his own flawed argument. There's a discussion to be had about domestic drilling - though I still feel it's a rather poor idea overall - but lying surely shouldn't be the way to actually advance the dialogue.
UPDATE: Of course, the other fatal flaw in Linder's argument is that the U.S. government already leases more than 60 million acres of federal land to the oil companies for exploration, but it's sitting idle right now. I'd be more inclined to examine new exploratory domestic drilling if the companies were, you know, actually exploring the land they already owned.
There is no evidence to support this claim - particularly since Cuba does not possess any refinery capabilities - yet Linder feels it necessary to parrot this falsehood to support his own flawed argument. There's a discussion to be had about domestic drilling - though I still feel it's a rather poor idea overall - but lying surely shouldn't be the way to actually advance the dialogue.
UPDATE: Of course, the other fatal flaw in Linder's argument is that the U.S. government already leases more than 60 million acres of federal land to the oil companies for exploration, but it's sitting idle right now. I'd be more inclined to examine new exploratory domestic drilling if the companies were, you know, actually exploring the land they already owned.
posted by Jmac at 11:03 AM
5 Comments:
I just don't get this exploration mindset that many in Congress have. I compare it to someone who wants to lose weight, gets liposuction, and then goes right on with their old behavior and then wonders 6 months later why they are fat again.
I do not consider myself a tree-hugger at all. But I don't think we can drill our way out of this - rather we need to start modifying our behavior to figure out what we do have more effectively.
And is anyone really surprised that the Republicans would lie about oil?
I don't understand the opposition to drilling for more oil. What good is oil to us when it's in the ground? Get it all out of there, I say.
If God had intended us to use oil he would have put it on the surface when he created the world 6,000 yrs ago, not deep in its crust!
People ARE curtailing their demand for oil. We're down 2-4% from last year in the U.S., for instance. It takes time for people to "adjust their lifestyle," esp. when you've built up a suburban population for over half a century on the assumption that oil would stay cheap.
People can't all move back into big cities and walk/take public transportation to work and to the grocery, etc. It doesn't happen overnight.
But meanwhile, the world doesn't work the way we think it does anyway. They've engineering bugs that poop crude oil (that burns clean, from a carbon-emissions perspective), for crying out loud. In any case, it is ridiculous to refuse to pursue measures right now to make the situation better. We need both short-term and long-term fixes. More oil will lower the price. Duh.
As to oil companies not using all the land they've currently got access to, does that have anything to do with the fact that we've got a freeze on building new refineries as well? You have to have both: access to land for drilling/extracting and the ability to refine it.
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