So, I’m driving back from the park yesterday, and I see a lawn sign that says, “Support Domestic Drilling NOW!” or something to that effect. It never ceases to amaze me how ignorant and easily manipulated people are in this country. Certainly, everybody here knows that there isn’t a moratorium on drilling for oil in the US. There’s a moratorium on new leases, but since the oil companies are just sitting on the leases they already have – some 68 million acres, or over 80 percent of US oil reserves – waiting for the price of oil to go even higher, handing over more leases to them isn’t going to make the price of gas or home heating oil go down. Not even a little bit. It would probably make the Exxon Mobil stock price go up, but that’s about it.

Hell at the House hearings on the “use it or lose it” bill the other day, and oil industry executive testfied that every piece of equipment they had was in use, so they couldn’t possibly be expected to drill for more oil on the leases they already own.

Even if they could magically find some hot pool of oil just waiting to be sucked out of the ground, it’d be a decade before we’d see any of it anyway. That’s ten years better spent developing alternative energy resources, not trying to make gas cheaper. I don’t like paying more for gas – and everything else either, but it’s the only way to wean this country (and the rest of the world) off an unhealthy addiction to a substance that’s both limited and toxic. That doesn’t do much to help working class folks who are just trying to get balc and forth to work every day, and put food on the table and a roof over the food. Forget the environment; the sad truth of it is that there won’t be any noticeable reduction in gas prices whether we allow the oil industry to rape our wilderness areas in search of greater profits or not.

But even if drilling did lower prices substantially and give working families much needed short-term relief (and not even the dubya believes that) we all know that oil won’t last forever. Whether we’re at “peak oil” at the moment or not, we certainly will be soon. So why not get off our addition to oil altogether (and make some money while we’re at it)? Fuck dumping more and more money into our oil infrastructure (and paying $12 Billion a month to protect oil industry investments in the Middle East). Take that money and invest it in clean renewable technologies. We may need oil at the present moment, but why spend the next decade focusing on making oil cheaper, when what we really need to do is make oil – and the dirty industry that has spread so much death and destruction across the face of the planet – obsolete.

But, of course, nobody wants to hear that. Gas is too expensive so fuck it. Drill. And then feel really, really confused when the price only continues to go up – almost as quickly as oil industry profits do.