Quote Originally Posted by Psycho4Bud
I've said it before, the price of oil and stance by the candidates will have great infuence on our next president. Let the price of gas crowd around $5.00/gal. and household oil in the Northern states rise to a price of $175/barrel and the "green vote" will turn from enviroment to the green in their pocket.

This will go down in history as the issue that crushed a candidate!
You almost sound happy that things might get so bad that we'll consider endangering our coastal environment with offshore drilling when otherwise we would never consider it. I don't see how you think the high price of gas possibly forcing the offshore drilling issue is a good thing. It's not a good thing when desperation forces you to do something you don't want to do. Hell, maybe it will get bad enough we'll have to burn all our furniture just to stay warm! That would be even better!

To me the high price of gas proves the petroleum industry is about done with --- we need to move away from it. I'd rather see the investment that would go toward developing these offshore wells go instead to finding an alternative. Either way we are a few years from seeing any benefit from the investment we make now. It makes more sense to me to spend that time and money finding a solution that might last awhile, rather than just blow it on unsustainable fossil fuel that will be burned and gone in a few years. The wakeup call we are getting is not to tell us to drill for more oil, it is to tell us to move on from oil.

Also, regarding the safety of offshore oil rigs, there is nothing you can do to guarantee their safety, and even when they function exactly as designed, there are still huge amounts of pollution. The Santa Barbara spill that triggered the ban on offshore drilling was not a failure of the rig --- it was a failure of the rock the rig was drilling through. Once they tapped the high-pressure pocket of oil, the oil forced it's way through flaws in the rock and spilled that way --- not through a ruptured pipe or damaged rig. You can't guarantee that won't happen again. And even when rigs do not spill, there is still a lot of ecological damage due to the shore facilities, pipelines, runoff, erosion, and other pollutants.