There's been a lot of chatter about how the Democrats in Congress might cave on expanded oil drilling because of high gas prices.
Well, Barack Obama came out strongly against that, calling it the cheap stunt that it is.
In Ohio today, he gave an energy speech that includes the following excerpt:
From his energy speech today on energy policy
Today, with oil and gas prices this high, we hear a lot of plans and proposals coming out of Washington since politicians are finally paying attention. The problem is, they’re reacting instead of acting. They’re searching for easy answers to get them through the next election instead of serious, long-term solutions that will offer real relief and real security for America.
I understand the politics. In a country desperate for action, ideas like a gas tax holiday or expanded oil drilling in the waters off our coasts are popular. And I’ll say this – if there were real evidence that these steps would actually provide real, immediate relief at the pump and advance the long-term goal of energy independence, of course I’d be open to them. But so far there isn’t.
As good as they sound, the history of gas tax holidays is that the prices go up to fill in the gap, and the big winners end up being the retailers and oil companies – not the American people. That’s what happened when we had a gas tax holiday in Illinois that I supported, and that’s why we ended up repealing it. It didn’t work. And it would also drain the federal highway fund of billions of dollars and cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs.
When it comes to offshore drilling, even Senator McCain has acknowledged that it won’t provide short-term relief. In fact, if we started drilling today, we wouldn’t see a drop of oil for seven years, and even then it would have little if any impact on prices.
Meanwhile, the oil companies currently have the rights to drill on 68 million acres of land and offshore areas that they haven’t touched. I believe that before we give the oil companies any more land, it’s time we tell them to start drilling on the land they already have or turn it over to someone who will, because we need that oil. We should also invest in the technology that can help us recover more oil from existing fields. And we should also look to our substantial natural gas reserves to tap a source of energy that’s already powering buses and cars here and around the world.
In the long-term, however, we have to remember that these domestic resources are finite. Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling, America still has only 3% of the world’s oil reserves. Senator McCain may believe otherwise, but that is not a real solution to our energy crisis.
What we need are real ideas to give hardworking Americans relief from high gas prices, and serious, long-term investments to permanently reduce our dependence on foreign oil. That’s exactly what my plan does.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/amandascott/gGxDJX
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