The American Freedom Network

Drilling into Reality

Energy is on folks’ minds for good reason. When winter comes those people, mostly in the east, who rely on heating oil will be hurting and complaining.

A frustration is the leftist (and Bill O’statist) talking point, reiterated ad nauseum, that “we can’t drill our way out of the problem”. That is just silly and illogical. If you have a shortage, producing more is an obvious solution. Particularly the way the oil futures markets work. If the speculators believe that more oil will come on the market then they will pay less for their futures as projected supplies come closer to projected demand. These are economic basics that high school sophmores are taught (if they don’t have a collectivist/marxist econ teacher).

The “we can’t drill our way out” argument is predicated on an unproven premise. That there isn’t sufficient oil to be drilled, produced and marketed. There hasn’t been an accurate forecast of actual oil availability to date. For more than 20 years (or longer) people have been wrongly predicting “run out” dates.

The actual challenges are to extract more oil from readily available areas and to increase refining capacity. These can be supplemented by rolling back silly regulations that require oil companies to refine a bazillion “flavors” of fuel.

The final and very necessary step is to adopt a sensible, fact over emotion based, rational energy policy for the future. Yes we should work towards energy alternatives. Yes we should encourage (not by government subsidy though) creative research to find new ways to power our society.

Such an approach is not mutually exclusive from simply producing more oil. Becoming self-sufficient in oil, which the U.S. can do is the best way to immediately address the current price spike.

Drill and refine more in the U.S. Do it now. Thinking people should be demanding this of their statist sheople-herders in the Congress.