Spill, Baby, Spill

Timing really is everything, isn't it? Had the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, sunk to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and started leaking some 5,000 barrels of oil per day 20 months ago, the McCain/Palin political catchphrase, "Drill, Baby, Drill!" would've been just ruined.

Back during the presidential campaign, just months after gasoline had hit $4 a gallon nationwide, the battle cry in one party's platform was that America could become completely energy independent - if we would just allow more drilling for crude oil on lands controlled by our country. That demonstrated a spectacular ignorance of how the oil industry actually works.

It was bad enough that two individuals running for the highest offices in the land either didn't know how oil exploration and production actually worked, or were simply saying that because it was popular with the crowds. Fortunately, cooler (or more knowledgeable) heads pointed out that anyone who wanted to drill new platforms in the Gulf of Mexico immediately would have to have been on a waiting list for a drill ship for at least four years. And they'd still have to wait some more, while the final oil platform was constructed and put in place.

That reality doesn't seem to have trickled down, but it's why oil companies think in terms of decades for future oil production. The public, not knowing how long new production takes, just wants the price of gasoline to go down tomorrow. For politicians it's simply pandering, energizing everybody you can to go out and vote for you. In the long run, of course, "Drill, Baby, Drill!" was no more inane than their opponent's mantra, "Change you can believe in!"

Because the U.S. imports half the oil we use, becoming energy independent would mean we'd have to double our domestic oil production. Even if we could do that, it would just be kicking the can down the road. Because we couldn't keep finding enough new fields to offset depleting our oil reserves that fast.

Energy independence is a pipedream, but it reliably gets the crowds at political rallies fired up.

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