Charles Krauthammer lays it out.
A lovely sentiment. But has Pelosi actually thought through the moratorium's actual effects on the planet?More.....Consider: 25 years ago, nearly 60% of U.S. petroleum was produced domestically. Today it's 25%. From its peak in 1970, U.S. production has declined a staggering 47%. The world consumes 86 million barrels a day; the United States, roughly 20 million. We need the stuff to run our cars and planes and economy. Where does it come from?
Places like Nigeria, where chronic corruption, environmental neglect and resulting unrest and instability lead to pipeline explosions, oil spills and illegal siphoning by the poverty-stricken population — which leads to more spills and explosions.
Just this week, two Royal Dutch Shell pipelines had to be shut down because bombings by local militants were causing leaks into the ground.
Compare the Niger Delta with the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.
The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling. Today, directional drilling — essentially drilling down, then sideways — allows access to oil that in 1970 would have required a surface footprint more than three times as large.
Additionally, the U.S. has one of the most extensive and least-corrupt regulatory systems on the planet.
Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?
The net environmental effect of Pelosi's no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world — thereby increasing net planetary damage.
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