My short contribution to an online debate in the New York Times about Obama’s decision to expand offshore drilling:
I consider myself an environmentalist and have written at length about the problems of oil extraction, but I have a hard time getting upset about the decision to expand offshore drilling.
As a matter of global justice, why should America exclude its coastlines while coastlines all over the world are drilled for oil that goes into American gas tanks? Banning oil companies from operating in our waters while encouraging them to do so in other people’s waters — there’s a whiff of hypocrisy to that, a sort of outsourcing of oil pollution. Perhaps if we suffer more of the inconvenience of extraction we will reconsider the merit of continuing down the road of a fossil-fuel based economy.
But don’t get me wrong — drilling to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and reduce gas prices is a charade. President Obama seems well aware of that, in a sense calling the other side’s bluff. With 2 percent of the world reserves, there is no way to extract our way to lower prices or energy independence; the impact will be between “not at all” and “hardly at all.”
The new policy, rather than being a vindication of the “drill, baby, drill” argument, will show its shallowness and hopefully allow us to have a more constructive debate about our energy future. Paradoxically, drilling a bit more in the short term may help the effort to drill a lot less in the future.
