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To Drill Or Not To Drill
Aug 10, 2008 
We Can Solve It will premiere a television ad Monday during the Olympic Games, asking Americans to help make the switch to clean, renewable energy sources. A project of The Alliance for Climate Protection--a nonprofit nonpartisan effort founded in 2006 by Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore, their goal is to halt global warming. Already one million strong, they'd like us to stand together as a country and say "No" to drilling for oil in the United States, opting instead for switching to 100% clean, renewable electricity.
At odds with the Gore movement is former Speaker Newt Gingrich's Drill Here. Drill Now campaign. (An American Solutions project) Almost 1.5 million people have signed their online petition (available even in Spanish) asking Congress to to quit 
"ignoring practical steps to stop the pain Americans are feeling at the pump." Launched in 2007, they hope to stem the tide of partisan politics to create a unified country stance on energy solutions.
We'd all like to see our country become clean, economically stable, using sustainable energy sources within the next ten years. Is it too short of a time?
Just as many wish to begin drilling here at home, or at least threaten to do so. In a recent op-ed by Gingrich intern Joel Alicea, he writes that while researching the oil price issue, he happened on a study--"The Effect of Opening Up ANWR to Drilling on the Current Price of Oil." Clearly concluding the point of economic theory that increasing supply lowers the price of oil, the study's author, Morris Coats wrote:
"If an amount of newly discovered oil is significant enough to reduce prices in the future...{this indirectly} reduces the current price of oil just as if there were a reduction in the marginal costs of extracting oil now."
To drill or not to drill, that's this week's flip-flop. What do you think about drilling in the United States?
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Reader Comments (1)
One question that no one is raising, and I do not claim to know the answer, but the question is an important one: "Which has a higher risk of contributing to oil-spill pollution, drilling on the OCS and transporting it via pipeline to a refinery in the US, or drilling outside of North America and transporting it to US refineries via tankers? If it is really oil spills that people are worried about, then how can we reduce oil spills in the US the best, by drilling here and pipelining the oil or by drilling elsewhere in the world (and spoiling someone else's environment) and risk a tanker spill.
Recently, the oil spill on the Mississippi was a tanker or barge spill. The Valdez spill was a tanker spill. Perhaps there are more spills from drilling and pipelines, but I really doubt it. The data is available from EIA.DOE.GOV.
I should say, though, my paper with Gary Pecquet neither advocates drilling or not drilling, but simply shows that allowing drilling brings the price of gasoline down soon, not the 7-10 years that it will take for that oil to begin to flow.
Also, no matter how much we supply ourselves, we cannot become isolate our US oil market from the world market without keeping US prices continually higher than they need be.
Morris Coats