Drill Domestically, Probably Not!

Democrat politicians like to crow that expanding domestic oil production by expanding exploration and drilling will not be effective in reducing gasoline prices at the pump. Their contention is that it would take years for increased supplies of domestic oil from new drilling to actually get to the pumps, so why bother? That ridiculous, flat-earth assertion notwithstanding, the news today illustrates the folly of this argument.

The United States, in concert with other members of the International Energy Agency, has agreed to release as much as 60 million barrels of oil from strategic stockpiles. Responding only to the news that reported this agreement, oil prices plummeted nearly 5% in a single day, to the lowest price in the last six months.

If world oil prices could be affected so significantly by the news concerning a relatively small injection of supply from the IEA’s strategic oil reserves, what would the promise of hundreds of millions of barrels of oil flowing from new US wells for decade upon decade have of world oil prices. Of course, prices would continue to plummet to levels where Americans could once again afford to drive cars, buy boats, fly on jet airplanes and heat their homes without taking a second job.

Prices would fall THE SAME DAY congress opened up new discovery opportunities, because oil prices reflect what the future supply would be. If the oil futures market gurus saw the prospect of a nearly unlimited supply of safe, domestically produced energy available for years, prices would necessarily fall. And that price reduction would become relatively permanent. Oil prices would stabilize at an affordable level. Businesses, governments, and individuals could plan for future energy use, secure in the knowledge that prices would be low and stable. Oil prices, the millstone around the neck of American families and businesses since the 1970’s, would once again become invisible and nearly irrelevant to consumers.

A renewal of domestic exploration and drilling is, sadly, not likely to happen with a democrat in the White House. Cheap and plentiful gasoline is anathema to the Obama Administration, as cheap energy would surely lead to increased consumption of gasoline, causing the planet to disintegrate in a firey blaze from man-made Global Warming. But cheap and plentiful energy supplies would also lead to an explosion of economic expansion and growth, which would lead to a massive reduction in the stratospheric unemployment rates that are choking Mr Obama’s popularity.

With the solution to his plummeting popularity right in front of his eyes, Mr Obama’s rigid ideological adherence to the socialist, redistributionist, big government, anti-business solutions that have failed him thus far will prevent him from taking this ridiculously easy and productive path back to prosperity and popularity. For someone who has castigated his predicessor's "failed policies," Mr Obama's rigid ideological allegiance to his own failing policies will guarantee a weak democrat candidate in the 2012 presidential election. In the end that will be good news for the republic, if not our wallets.