Obama Has More to Think About Beyond Climate Change
By Jason Cunningham
Environmentalists have declared President Barack Obama’s decision to lift the ban on offshore drilling as the most detrimental and unproductive decision of his presidency. Though the outburst may make the situation seem unexpected, plans to open our waters to drilling have been talked about since Obama was on the campaign trail. Taking this step should come as a surprise to no one.
Equally unhappy are the Republican Party, whose top ranking member House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) dismissed the plan on the day it was announced. Shouts of outrage on both sides usually mean a halfway decent compromise has been made.
Fiscally, drilling offshore on the southern Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and north coast of Alaska is intelligent. CNNMoney.com reported that depending on the number of new rigs created, drilling could create jobs for up to 25,000 people working offshore with salaries as high as $90,000. Additionally, the federal government and some states stand to gain royalties from drilling.
Experts maintain that the East Coast isn’t likely to have large oil reserves and no one honestly knows how much oil is in any of the new drilling areas. Finding large reserves, however, isn’t the main goal. Easing our dependence on foreign oil over a long period of time is.
Obama isn’t waving a middle finger to the environment and he’s not substituting finding alternative fuel sources for drilling. He’s trying to satisfy a need. Our thirst for oil isn’t going away within the next 20 years, but hopefully it’ll be decreased, eliminating the need for more expansive efforts to obtain oil in the future. Most Americans have no problem with offshore drilling when it’s not happening close to home. Accepting drilling and its consequences is a reality our fast consuming country must face.
This decision doesn’t call for harsh criticism; not only is drilling offshore a good choice, but it actually says in the most public way possible that Obama is thinking about a larger picture. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) claims that the efforts Obama has made to please both sides are contradictory, saying, “It also appears President Obama is caught in a contradiction: the President is, on the one hand, pushing forward with global warming policies to make fossil fuels more expensive, while on the other hand, he’s talking about drilling for more fossil fuels offshore. How does the President square these two policies?”
It’s not as if a depleting natural resource should be cheap when it’s a main contributing factor to our environment’s increasing jeopardy. As oil is phased out as our primary fuel as planned, it’ll only get more expensive. Obviously, high oil prices aren’t convenient, but they’re realistic and morally tolerable.
Drilling doesn’t mean the United States isn’t seeking an edge in the global marketplace in renewable, clean energy. Obama isn’t leading a global climate action plan; he’s leading a country. Positive reform and research is still underway, but in the meantime the roar of the gas pumps stills calls out loud.