“Drill, Baby, Drill” is the Republican rally call for extensive exploration of continental shelves for additional oil and natural gas resources, and eventually construction of offshore platforms to extract these fossil fuels from the depths. “Drill, Baby, Drill” is gaining traction nationally with many conservative and moderate voters who would like America to become energy independent, or non-reliant upon foreign nations for our energy needs.
Take a peek at the crowd response at this year’s Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Certainly energy independence is a great goal for the United States to achieve in the next 10 years. Drilling for offshore oil is obviously popular with the American people. But also popular with the American people are clean, beautiful oceans. Citizens of coastal regions are also quite protective of their ocean views, sometimes voting down offshore windfarm proposals that could reduce their property values. Will voters change their support for offshore oil and gas drilling when it’s their backyard ocean and harbors that are being drilled in?
There is precedence for such a switch in support. Environmentally minded folks refer to this phenomena as NIMBY, or Not In My BackYard.
The Philadelphia Inquirer looks into the possibility of offshore drilling off the coast of New Jersey. The results of their inquiries suggest that local residents are not suffering from a case of NIMBY when it comes to something that could* affect gas prices.
A 62 percent majority of likely New Jersey voters polled this month by Quinnipiac University Polling Institute said they favored drilling in protected offshore areas.
An even higher percentage of Jersey Shore voters - 70 percent - supported lifting the ban, polling spokesman Pat Smith said. The poll released yesterday did not ask specifically about drilling off the New Jersey coast.
Look, I’m not here to argue the merits and flaws of offshore drilling**. All I’m trying to say here is that, people are really supportive of the idea, even those who would most likely be negatively affected by such activities. This strong sentiment, that of keeping gas prices as low as possible, regardless of the environmental costs is just something that people and politicians need to keep in mind.
* - You know it could affect gas prices, in like 10 years or so.
** - But just for the record, offshore drilling is in my opinion not worth the risk right now. We don’t yet know the environmental impacts of the construction of offshore oil rigs. We’ll have to invest a lot of resources into offshore exploration, to find the reserves. Then we will have to construct new infrastructure to extract the oil and natural gas. By the time we get a steady flow of oil and natural gas, it will be 10 years later, and oil prices will likely be outrageously high. Additionally, the amount of energy we get from such an endeavor will be very small compared to our consumption rate.
Additionally, if we do invest in offshore drilling infrastructure, we will be committing a tremendous amount of money into something that will probably only be viable for a short period of time. There is a limited amount of fossil fuels off the US coast, and it is not likely to meet our energy needs for a long duration of time. Instead, doesn’t it make sense to start investing in alternative energies, technology that will work for the US forever?
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