April 28, 2010

The Oil Spill and The Birkenstock Crowd

Quickly on the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana, some observations.  This will likely re-energize the anti-drilling crowd, however it should not mute the pro-drilling crowd.  The fact of the matter remains that drilling is necessary and oil spills can come from foreign-owned drilling platforms just as easily as American based platforms.  Cuba has granted both China and Russia permission to search for oil.  And since there is no solar or electric grail on the 5 or 10 year horizon just yet, the United States is going to continue to need to use oil for the foreseeable future.  Here's the reality for those of you in the Birkenstock crowd - You can hope all you want for another reality but it won't change things.
We still need oil.


We still need North American oil, even more.  Given that the anti-Iraq crowd wanted to give sanctions a much bigger chance than it already had (some retro-actively claiming so), during the run-up to the latest Iraq War, some truths are evident. It would make sense that the same crowd view tools of diplomacy to include economic levers and also that these levers are by far preferential to military action.  Considering that they too claim to want to stop terrorism and cannot bring themselves to use military force, you'd think they'd want to do what they can to stop sending money for oil to nations that support terrorism.  That could be achieved to some determinable extent, by drilling for oil domestically. So why the reluctance? The truth is that reconciling the green part of the Democrat platform with the soft diplomacy part isn't always possible because the way the disparate constituencies have been cobbled together amounts to a house of cards.

Oil spills are an unfortunate mistake, and an occasional by-product of resource extraction. But going back to my point in the first paragraph - Who should you trust more to avoid an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; Americans, the Russians or the Chinese?

2 comments:

  1. Your right. The pro-drilling crowd must not let up. Accidents can happen with anything, and that includes with both foreign and domestic oil platforms. WE must stop aiding these countries who want to harm us.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Frankly I'm surprised there hasn't been a more vocal eco-outrage already. I assume it's yet to come.

    ReplyDelete

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