Our Views: Premature indignation
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Once again, Republicans are accusing the Obama administration of — well, something.
Some members of Congress fired off a letter saying that an interagency review of national policy toward the oceans should not foreclose the possibility of more drilling or other uses of the resources of the seas.
Note that there is no action on recommendations yet by the interagency panel, or really any substantial evidence to back up the suspicions of the congressional members. There’s an old saying that the graveyards are full of gunslingers who failed to act on their suspicions. At the same time, national policy should not be made by posturing around without some credible grounds for an argument.
That’s the definition of partisanship by the minority, which has not yet grown into statesmanship.
Should the United States have more offshore oil drilling? Of course. Even the best-case scenarios for renewable fuels suggest the necessity for significant new oil drilling for many decades ahead.
Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency summarized well the realities of setting energy policy. “At the global level, we will need to use all of our energy options simultaneously,” Fatih Birol wrote. “We need to combine greater energy efficiency with increased deployment of renewable and nuclear energy, while minimizing our dependence on using oil, gas and coal in an unsustainable way.”
Oil isn’t going away, Birol said, nor is the intellectual capital of the oil industry out of work in the future: “Not only will there still be demand for oil, but today’s oil industry runs on the type of transferable skills the world needs to shift toward the low-carbon fuels of tomorrow.”
This should not be a partisan fight in the U.S. Congress. The dimensions of every challenge cited by Birol require some level of bipartisan agreement.
We understand that many Democrats, and many Republicans, in the East Coast states or in California are anti-drilling. Over time, that opposition can be overcome, we think, because of the successes demonstrated in much of the Gulf of Mexico. But shooting at Obama’s little task force before its policy recommendations are drawn is gunslinging that has more to do with politics than policy.
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