Gasoline, premium grades at least, are already nudging toward $4 per gallon in north Texas, I paid $3.89 per gallon this morning. After my past blogs about drilling for oil on our own turf in Alaska and off our coasts, I got a couple of nasty notes from readers who think me insensitive to environmental concerns. They think we ought to be plowing hard and fast into alternative fuels and not spend another dime looking for oil.
Well, how do you feel now that we are bleeding money through our noses after being sucker punched with the price of gasoline now, and what it has done to the cost of our food and other basics we cannot do without. What I am insensitive to is people who preach the future and ignore our immediate needs. If we don’t take care of our gasoline needs now, and get prices back under control, our economy will slip further into the tank and we won’t get any closer to an alternative to gasoline.
Look, I love clean air and water and Caribou as much as anyone else. But, it is irrational to ignore the fact that we have some of the world’s largest oil reserves under our own feet, and to know we have new technology that will let us drill, extract and transport that oil in environmentally safe ways. Using old environmentalists scare tactics and global warming arguments to prevent us from dilling is to ignore the fact we must buy survival time until we come up with the alternatives.
New York Senator Chuck Schumer is a big offender of distorting what is possible in Alaska. He said yesterday the President’s proposal to drill in Anwr would not produce oil for 10 years. My oil industry sources say otherwise. They suggest a crash program could locate potential drill sites within weeks and drilling could start immediately, and with luck oil could be out of the ground before Christmas. There would also need to be a crash program to build a pipeline to get the oil to market, but that too is possible I am told.
Add to that, Congress needs to move quickly to remove barriers preventing construction of new environmentally sound refineries in this country. We need to at least provide incentives to rapidly expand our existing refineries, achievable in a much shorter time frame that building a new one. You want a jobs program to boost the economy and lower gasoline prices? Here is the plan.
Folks, I am all for hitting the oil companies with windfall profits taxes, or incentives that will force them to use that money to help GM, Ford, Chrysler and all others to develop alternative fuel vehicles, I happen to like the hydrogen approach. But, we cannot wait for those alternatives to get here. We need help now, and here it is, right under our own feet. When are we going to wake up.
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