Sunday, August 23, 2009

Drill There, Drill Now

Just unbelievable. The WSJ reports on the Obama administration lending billions of dollars to Brazil for offshore drilling.

The Bush Administration's five-year plan (2007-2012) to open the outer continental shelf to oil exploration included new lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. But in 2007 environmentalists went to court to block drilling in Alaska and in April a federal court ruled in their favor.

So do environmentalists only care about the environment of the United States?

As Charles Krauthammer on Fox News pointed out:

"...if you're subsidizing or underwriting drilling offshore in Brazil, then you're completely undermining the reason to prohibit drilling offshore in the U.S.

The reason Obama opposes it and the reason the liberals oppose it is because of the environment. But by not drilling here, we simply have the drilling end up elsewhere, and it doesn't reduce pollution on the planet. It simply exports it into poorer countries where the safeguards are much less, for example, in Nigeria, where there are oil spills and siphoning and explosions all the time.

So the net effect on the planet of drilling elsewhere instead of here is that there is more pollution and despoiling of the environment, and it reduces American jobs. It makes no sense at all.

It seems that nothing liberals do makes any sense at all.