Excuse me, David Letterman, but I want to borrow your Top Ten Reasons concept to make a point that seems to be eluding a lot of politicians today:
10. Offshore oil drilling won't impact gas prices today, and it won't have a significant impact on gas prices in the future.
9. This is nothing more than a money grab by the oil companies - who are already making record-breaking profits.
8. We burn 25% of the world's oil here in the U.S., but we have only 3% of the world's oil reserves. So even if all offshore oil magically came to market today, the vast majority of our oil would continue to be imported, and we wouldn't see price relief at the pump.
7. The current moratorium was put in place decades ago to protect us from the danger of oil spills along our coastlines and beaches.
6. Burning fossil fuels like oil causes global warming, which causes stronger hurricanes, which will threaten the very offshore drilling rigs being proposed, which will contribute to even more global warming.
5. To avoid the worst impacts of global warming, we need to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy within the next 10 years. The billions of dollars that would be spent on offshore oil drilling just postpones the inevitable transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
4. Oil exploration requires massive seismic testing - which threatens whales and dolphins.
3. Oil prices are set on the global oil market, so American oil is no cheaper than Saudi oil. We won't get a discount for oil drilled in the U.S.
2. We can't solve the world's energy problems with the same drilling that created them.
1. Renewable energy is available now, so it's time to walk away from fossil fuels and toward a clean energy future.
Learn more from Greenpeace.org
Resources:
Science Daily: Robots Taking Over the Jobs on Offshore Oil Drilling Platforms
University of Oslo: A comprehensive analysis of the effects of offshore oil and gas exploration and production on the benthic communities of the Norwegian continental shelf (.pdf)
San Francisco Chroncile: Schwarzenegger to Fight Offshore Drilling
National Resources Defense Council: The True and False of Oil Drilling -President Bush and the oil companies would have you believe that we can drill our way to lower gas prices. Is it fact or damaging fiction?
CultureChange.org: Committee Against Oil Exploration
How Stuff Works: How Oil Drilling Works
Wikipedia: Oil Platforms
T. Boone Pickens: The Pickens Plan
Obama-Biden: Comprehensive New Energy for America Plan
1 comments:
I just ran across this interesting article "Drill Here, Drill Now," that delivered a number of interesting points about offshore drilling. One interesting fact is that 620,500 barrels of oil ooze organically from North America's ocean floors each year, compared to the average 6,555 barrels that oil companies have spilled annually since 1998. It's an interesting article and i suggest you read it.
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