McCain credits Bush for drop in oil price

[dragonrider]

I don't see how you can state that when just having Bush lift the Presidential ban dropped the price of crude by $15 per barrel.

I can state it bacause I do not believe the price dropped in response to Bush lifting the Presidential ban.

Once again, the numbers speak for themselves.

If you read the article you linked to for those numbers. It says that of that 85.9 billion barrels of crude that MIGHT be held in the outer continental shelf, 75% is already in areas being actively drilled or open to exploration. The ban affects possibly 21 billion barrels that MIGHT be there. It's not worth it.

Your article also had this to say:

In addition, offshore oil exploration is slow and costly.

If the federal government opened California's coast to drilling tomorrow, the first exploratory wells probably wouldn't be drilled for at least six years, Medlock said. Bringing newly discovered oil fields into full production would take longer.

That means any new oil wouldn't arrive on the market until midway through the next decade, at the earliest. The process is slow enough that the Energy Information Administration, the statistics branch of the U.S. Department of Energy, estimated last year that opening the coasts to offshore drilling would have no significant impact on oil prices before 2030.

I'm thinking that if we got started now, maybe we could have a better solution in place by 2030 wthout endangering our coasts to tap the last 25% of our estimated reserves.