The Obama administration’s fortune in having the SEC announce
criminal charges against Goldman Sachs days before the Senate was
to vote on a financial regulations bill did not stick when the
national discussion changed to offshore oil drilling. Three weeks
after the president announced his intentions to allow limited
offshore oil exploration, a drilling accident in the Gulf of
Mexico released what some experts predict could be the largest
oil spill in history.
Doh.
Now, environmental activists are exploiting the oil spill
and calling on the president to drop his plans to expand offshore
drilling. The administration should ignore them. It is right; the
radical greens wrong.
Even if this spill becomes history’s largest, it will
remain an extraordinarily rare outlier. Anti-drilling extremists
don’t want to admit it, but the science bears out that offshore
drilling is extremely safe. The occasional spill happens, but
they are rare and typically quite small.
The Energy Information Administration has determined that
offshore drilling within the USA’s Exclusive Economic Zone has a
99.999 percent safety rate, meaning that only .0001 percent of
extracted oil has been spilled.
In fact, natural seepage leaks far more oil into the oceans
than man-made spills do, according to a joint study by NASA and
the Smithsonian Institution. The study found that natural
underground leaks put an average of 62 million gallons of oil a
year into the world’s oceans. Offshore drilling? Just 15 million
gallons a year. Tanker spills leak 37 million gallons a
year.
Just as importantly, major spills seem to produce
terrifying visuals at the time, but little if any lasting
ecological damage.
Yet all of this science isn’t helping Obama with the
greens, which is ironic
When Obama announced his offshore drilling plans in late
March, the radical environmental groups acted as if Obama’s
middle initial were W. “We’re appalled that the president is
unleashing a wholesale assault on the oceans,” Jackie Savitz of
Oceana told the New York Times.
After the spill, Savitz released a statement saying, “This
event is a bitter reminder that offshore drilling is not safe,
and that we need to be moving away from the dirty and dangerous
energy choices of the past.”
The irony is that Obama is having the same strategy he used
to pass his health care legislation turned against him. The
president got the health care bill passed by ignoring the
research and hyping the anecdotes. Every cancer patient without
health insurance was presented as the norm, not the exception,
while the positive aspects of the system were downplayed and the
fact that the vast majority of Americans were a) covered, and b)
liked their coverage was ignored in a rush to change the entire
system.
Now, the administration is stuck defending its
scientifically backed policy while the opposition attempts to
affect change by exploiting the emotional reaction to a tragic
event that is not representative of the norm.
To its credit, The White House is holding firm. Yesterday
it released a statement calling its plan a “thoughtful,
scientifically grounded process for determining which new areas
on the outer continental shelf are appropriate for exploration
and development, and for assessing the potential risks and
benefits of development in areas that are being explored.”
That’s more or less right. Obama limited the reach of his
drilling proposal for political reasons, but the decision to
expand drilling is scientifically and environmentally sound. No
matter how much the mainstream press falls for the claim that
this spill proves drilling environmentally catastrophic, it
isn’t, and Obama mustn’t let the exploitation of this unfortunate
accident stop his much-needed expansion.
