Is Obama Actually Drilling for Votes?

By Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis

Scripps Howard News Service

Is President Barack Obama's offshore-drilling proposal good policy or cynical politics?

Obama may have surprised supporters and opponents alike when he announced plans to end a two-decade-old moratorium and allow new oil exploration off the East Coast. Some environmentalists reacted with anger, while conservative critics suggested his proposal doesn't go far enough.

Is Obama selling out the environment? Or is this a gambit to win support for his expansive energy and climate-change agendas? Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis, the RedBlueAmerica columnists, dig into the issue.

Ben Boychuk

It's past time the United States expanded offshore oil drilling. After all, if America doesn't explore oil deposits under the waters of near Alaska, off the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, it's a sure bet that China and Russia will. President Obama's proposal would be the first new offshore oil exploration in nearly a generation.

Beyond the headlines, however, the president's proposal is much less ambitious that it appears.

Obama is actually retreating from a Bush administration plan that would have opened a much larger area of the Outer Continental Shelf to exploration. And Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the cancellation of leases that would have allowed new oil platforms in Alaska's Bristol Bay.

The president says he want to pursue new offshore exploration as part of a broader energy strategy. At the heart of the Obama administration's strategy is a bill to impose a cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions while subsidizing alternative energy sources, including nuclear, geothermal, wind and solar.

Cap-and-trade is a massive boondoggle ― a surefire way to raise costs on businesses and families while imposing artificial limits on economic growth. Renewables show more promise in the long-term, but not without heavy taxpayer subsidies.

Besides, there aren't nearly enough acres for all the solar panels and windmills we would need to meet our demands (and think of the poor birds). And any new nuclear-power plant is at least seven years away from coming online.

Fact is, the United States is going to be a petroleum-based economy for some time to come. Rather than rely on volatile supplies from increasingly hostile regimes, Obama should open the Outer Continental Shelf ― and Alaska and California, for that matter ― for American firms to explore and use until better, cleaner and greener technologies are ready to for the market.

Joel Mathis

President Obama's oil-drilling announcement is indeed perplexing ― but not for the reasons you might think.

Environmentalists, after all, were well aware that Obama campaigned in 2008 on allowing offshore drilling as part of a broader, comprehensive energy strategy. The question they have after this week's announcement is: Where's the broader, comprehensive energy strategy?

It's true that Obama wants to take other actions ― promotion of nuclear, solar and wind power ― that increase America's energy resources while reducing its production of greenhouse gases. His support of offshore drilling is designed to win Republican support for the other items on his energy agenda.

But GOP leaders have shown they believe their best pathway back to power is to resist every item of the Obama agenda, without compromise.

Now that he's committed to offshore drilling without requiring any concessions from Republicans, what incentive do they now have to cooperate? Purely as a matter of political strategy, it would have been wiser for Obama to use the issue as a bargaining chip instead of pre-emptive surrender.

Politics aside, there's a real danger here: Nobody believes that the world oil supply will last forever. Offshore drilling can be useful only if we intentionally use it as a bridge to our low-carbon alternative-energy future.

It should only proceed on that basis. Otherwise, Obama might just be the next in a long line of presidents who deepened our unsustainable addiction to oil, even while deploring it all the way.

Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis blog and podcast every week at https://www.infinitemonkeysblog.com and https://joelmathis.blogspot.com/.