"Drill baby drill"

There I've said it...and I am sure I will catch hell from my environmentalist friends.

In Obama's speech last week he jumped on the "clean energy" bandwagon and made his best argument to "rid ourselves of fossil fuels". We heard the typical anecdotes of "Joe the shrimp fisherman" whose livelihood has been destroyed because of oil - a classic political tactic to push through another big government agenda.

Obama was very disingenuous in one part of his speech saying that, "We are running out of places to find oil". That is pure BS. The reason that oil companies have been moving to deeper water is because of the power of the environmental lobby that have made it impossible to drill in shallow water and on land. There are billions of barrels of oil in Anwar that would only require a footprint of a few acres to drill and in the event of a "rare" blowout disaster (like we are now experiencing), the blowout could be shut down in a matter of hours or days.

The liberals (progressives) want "clean" energy, yet we haven't built a new nuclear power plant in more that 20 years. And remember, even though nuclear is "clean", can we recall the Three Mile Island accident or Chernobyl in Russia where the land around that failed reactor will be radioactive for a few thousand years?

We have all seen this picture depicting the tragedy of hundreds of birds being killed by the oil spill. It is emotional to anyone that looks at it...even me. But this is where the media, the environmentalists, and even this liberal administration of ours shape our opinion to fit their agenda. Here are some interesting statistics from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service (http://www.fws.gov/birds/mortality-fact-sheet.pdf):


- Communication towers kill 4-5 million birds each year.
- Transmission power lines kill tens of thousands of birds each year.
- Cars kill 60 million birds each year.
- Pesticides kill an estimated 72 million birds each year.
- Domestic cats kill an estimated 39 million birds each year.
- And wind turbines (that magical "green" energy source); kill an estimated 33,000 birds each year.

Here's my point - I am not trying to minimize the oil spill disaster, just trying to keep things in perspective and show how the media can use a few well placed pictures of birds covered with oil to shape the emotional impact of a story.

The oil spill is a disaster and will affect many lives. But it is the result of the short cuts taken by BP to save money and get that well on line. I am not making excuses for the oil industry but I know something about that business and there is NOTHING that will replace oil for many years (maybe decades). This oil spill is the first major accident in 60 years of drilling in the gulf.
The problem is BP not oil.


The last thing we need is a new "cap and tax" energy program that will give the government more control over our lives, hurt the economy, and do nothing to help our dependence on foreign oil. What we need is a long range energy plan that explores every possible energy source, but for a long time we will need oil, and I believe we should drill for our own instead of being dependent on countries that hate us for our future energy supplies.