The Oil Test

Watching the news summary on the July 23 PBS Newshour, I heard John McCain say at a town hall meeting: "As soon as the president announced that we were going to lift the moratorium on off-shore drilling, the price of a barrel of oil went down $10. As soon as we get that oil off-shore, then it's not only going to help us with our supply, but it's going to affect this futures market, which, obviously, as we know, has gone out of sight."

I know McCain has said that the economy is his strong suit, but can he really believe his own statment? First, many experts, including a recent federal task force, doubt that the futures market is responsible to any significant degree for the price of oil today. Second, it's simply ludicrous to think that the prospect that oil supply that, by our government's own estimates, won't come online for another 9 years or so can possibly affect the markets to bring down the price of gas today. It's bad enough that McCain admits that he doesn't understand economics; but we should at least have a candidate who doesn't automatically confuse coincidence with cause and effect.

But the larger problem is that drilling seems to have the support of a majority of Americans, and the issue may be gaining political traction for the November elections. Democrats need to hammer Republicans with the truth.

The truth is that drilling domestically for oil that won't come online for nearly a decade won't lower gas prices right now. And that whatever new oil is there simply isn't enough to have a substantial effect on prices even when it does come online. With only 3% of the world's proven reserves and a need to import 65% of our oil, we simply cannot produce our way out of our oil problems. Yes, the Republicans are proposing an easy solution--an easy solution that won't work (but will make a lot of money for oil companies).

So we can do the easy thing and change nothing, or we can take the problem seriously. Most of our oil is used for gas, and the cheapest gallon of gas is the one you never have to buy. We can't pretend that we'll have new technologies to completely free us of oil in the next ten years, but we know for a fact that we can double our present fuel efficiency--because the Europeans have already done it. So we can cut oil imports in half just by replacing our cars, which most of us will do within the next decade anyway, with better ones. And that will reduce the cost to drive around more than any amount of domestic drilling will.

We can frame the argument in terms of patriotism. We can frame it in terms of the past versus the future. It doesn't help the country to support drilling while we continue our present, failed course. Drilling won't help bring Iran to the bargaining table. Drilling won't reduce the need to have our troops ready to protect oil supplies. Drilling won't keep us from sending billions of dollars overseas to countries that don't like us but sell us their oil. And drilling won't bring down gas prices.

If we're patriotic, we'll move towards more fuel efficiency to increase our political leverage with Iran and other nations. We can end the threat of being held hostage by oil suppliers. We can stop funding dictatorial and oppressive regimes. We can dramatically reduce the pollutants we put into the air. And we can do it today, right now; we don't have to wait the better part of a decade that drilling would take even if it were effective, which it isn't.

Let's tell the American people they face a test: we can go for the easy solution that won't really solve a thing, or we can choose to rise to the occasion and take real action for a real solution.

The facts are on our side. We need to make them matter again.