Drill baby, Drill!

This has been a battle cry for a while now, thanks to Sarah. Now, it’s fodder for domestic and foreign policy wonks, primarily because of the general unrest in the Middle East. While I normally enjoy a healthy romp through the mire of Middle Eastern affairs, but Thomas Lamb already covered that admirably at Red County.

Oil Rig in Santa Barbara Channel - Ken Lund (CC)

Environmental arguments against drilling aside, there is one very important issue that environmentalists really don’t want people to consider. Oil companies are businesses, and as such, they are interested primarily in one thing – the bottom line. They want to make profits, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. When T. Boone Pickens came out publicly with his Plan for Energy Independence, the writing was on the wall. Big oil doesn’t want to get cornered out of the future energy markets, period. They don’t care how they stay in the game. Black gold is not their only interest anymore.

So what’s the problem, other than a bunch of environmentalists crying about how we’re killing the planet? The problem is our government’s apparent inability to attach strings to deals with anyone – particularly businesses. The bail-outs showed us that in the extreme. No one in Washington seems to have the nerve to suggest that oil companies should pay society back for the ability to drill for more oil in research dollars – dollars they’re already spending anyway, but would undoubtedly increase for this benefit. The Left talks about government investment in green research and technology, and it’s unnecessary. Businesses are already willing to pony up for all of that, because they don’t want to be cornered out of “what’s next.”

The reality is that we’re not going to get off our dependence on oil anytime soon, and as long as we’re left dealing with the Middle East for our supply, we’re at the mercy of madmen. We need to become self-reliant yesterday, and the only way we’re going to do that right now is if we drill everywhere we can. That is an undeniable reality. We put this off long enough, and it honestly won’t save us completely from the economic mess we’re already in. It will get worse before it gets better, if we started drilling tomorrow. It will just plain get worse if we continue relying on oil from the Middle East. That’s the real inconvenient truth.