This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.
Gas prices are sky high, as everybody knows, and the main reason is increased demand. But the solution is not to resume offshore drilling in the U.S., as the current administration suggests.
Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp discussed this issue in a PBS interview last week with Charlie Rose, and again in a guest post on Grist. Here’s an excerpt from Grist:
[W]e reject the suggestion from the White House that we can drill our way out of our energy problems. Should we drill in ANWR and other environmentally sensitive areas? No, as I clearly stated on the show. Is lifting the ban on offshore drilling the right way to address rising gas prices? No. America holds about three percent of the world’s oil reserves. Bringing it to market would scarcely make a dent in the price of oil, and likely not for decades, according to the Energy Information Administration.
What we need now are policies that reduce our oil dependence and create incentives for new energy sources that protect the climate. That’s precisely what a cap on global warming pollution will do: cut our oil imports (by as much as $490 billion over the next two decades) and kick start the development of alternatives.
6 Comments
Absolutely. Do not drill for new oil in sensitive areas since it won’t make any differenct on foreign dependence for at least 10 years and even then only a minor dent in our foreigh demand. Also, in 10 years, we ‘should’ be well on our way to other forms of energy, not so dependent on oil. Big profits are making energy companies lazy in regards to energy innovations and it appears it will take incentives for them to start kicking the oil habbit.
Just curious…what are these posts that have ‘Pingback’ as the source?
Pingbacks are posted automatically when another Web page links to the blog post. It’s a favorite device of spammers – a way to get a link back to a junk site – so I spend a lot of time deleting the trash ones. We don’t really need pingbacks from our own posts and sometimes I delete them, but sometimes I don’t bother.
It was from pingbacks that I found out the WSJ was linking to our posts – also the PBS station in NYC.
The pingback there now will be gone after I post this comment because it’s from a spam site. They hit us every day with as many as a dozen pingbacks. It’s very tedious. :)
Spam is why I don’t start my own blog site. Spam is a real pain. I tried starting a blog on the benefits of global warming over the short term (if any), but as soon as I had it posted, I got spam messages, so I deleted it after two days.
Requiring registration to post helps quite a bit. The spam was unbearable until we did that.
There’s also software you can use, but sometimes the solution is worse than the problem. We briefly were using some anti-spam software that didn’t let people post any external links. That went a bit too far. So now I just delete junk pingbacks, which is about the only spam we get now.
Has anyone come to the conlcusion that mabye its not waht where putting into our environment thats causing global warming but mabye what where taking out of it. I mean the united states alone needs to takes out millions of gallons of oil A DAY just to supply the demand we as americans have to get to and from work every day. The oil was put there for a specific reason, what that reason is i dont know, and im pretty sure most people wouldnt know what oil actually does for the earth, but think of it like this. An automobile needs oil to run, right, and the earth is ran by what i like to call a large mechanism. This mechanism needs fuel to keep it going, so what is a better means of keeping a machine going, then OIL! I havent heard anyone talk about the dependence that the earth has for its oil, just the depence that we as humans have for oil. Stop drilling for it, and mabye well see a sharp decline in global warming.
I have to wonder why there have been no comments or commentary on the news regarding General Motors Plans to “save” their company. The intent is to develop an electric car, called “the volt” that will be recharged by plugging into the grid. Am I the only one that sees the problem here?
With infrastructure being what it is, and the grid already taxed out by summer heat and winter cold creating black outs and brown outs, NOT TO MENTION that we are SUPPOSED to be LIMITING and REDUCING our energy consumption, isn’t this just another recipe for disaster? GM has coupled with the utilities for this plan, who will obviously reap the benefits.
There needs to be a great public outcry about this before billions are invested in this (just another like corn for fuel) bad idea. GM was short sighted and greedy when they began producing the Hummer for civilian sales, not to mention other gas hungry vehicles. This is yet again very short sighted. This will only transfer the issue, rather than truely offer a long term viable solution.
Whereas offshore and anwar drilling are obviously short sited and in no way a solution (and transfer stress to the ocean and wilderness environements), this is no different. There must be increased outreach and education to dispell the rhetorical spin that is being utilzed to gain support…especially via our candidates and congress. If they don’t have the appropriate “education” they will not make the “appropriate” choices.