Are You Stupid? Of Course, We Should Keep Drilling Offshore

13 May, 2010 by John Hawkins

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What’s the alternative? Living in the Stone Age? Every country in the world:  is : highly reliant on oil and while that will eventually change, when a better, cheaper alternative is available, that day could very easily be decades away. The American people understand this and that’s why these poll results are much more realistic than the rhetoric you’re hearing out of DC:

Even after the recent – and highly publicized – oil spill in the Gulf Coast, that’s the overwhelming sentiment from the public, with six in 10 Americans supporting more offshore drilling, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

In addition, a majority believes that the potential economic benefits of offshore drilling outweigh its potential harm to the environment.

…Despite the spill, 60 percent say they support allowing for more drilling off U.S. coasts, and 53 percent believe that offshore drilling’s potential economic benefits outweigh its potential harm to the environment.

The public is split on the federal government’s response to the spill: 45 percent say it has not done enough, while 43 percent say it has done enough.

By comparison, 50 percent say that British Petroleum, which leased the oil rig, has not done enough, versus 37 percent who think that it has.

This BP oil spill? It needs to be contained and cleaned up. We also need to figure out what went wrong and take additional measures to make it as unlikely as possible that it happens again. But, other countries are going to continue drilling offshore and we need to do it, too. That’s just the reality of the world we live in. If anything, we should be doing much more drilling, not less.

Saying we’re going to stop drilling offshore because of the BP spill is like saying you’re never going to drive a car again because you had a wreck. In other words, it’s so dumb that most people don’t even need to get an explanation of why it’s dumb. If only the average politician in DC were as smart as “most people.”