"NOPE" stands for…  “Not on Planet Earth,” and it is the motto of that wing of the Democratic Party that refuses to consider drilling for more oil. It is not, by any means, the motto of the whole party.
     It is the rallying cry however for Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the congressional Democrats, whose position on drilling for oil is beginning to look more and more like a dusty little hill in Montana where George Custer probably said something like, “We’ll hold 'em here,” as thousands of unhappy Native Americans poured out of the villages along the Little Big Horn to see what the bluecoats were up to now.

     For the first time in recent memory…  the Democrats are bucking the public on a major issue. Most polls place support for new oil drilling around 75 percent.
     It’s not just $4 gas that has captured the public’s imagination. Heating bills have doubled and trebled in the Northeast. My personal monthly budget fuel oil payment for my small house went from $120 a month to $241. My electricity is generated by burning oil. That has gone from about $180 a month to $400. A budget plan I worked on all year so that we could get by was blown to bits and I did the only sane thing a reasonable man could.
     I had a heart attack Thursday night.
    
     I’m back home now... 20 pounds lighter, a bit weaker and none the better off financially for the experience.
     What will give you your heart attack?
     Maybe it will be that first bill from the electric company this summer. I have to have at least some AC on, or I have trouble breathing our polluted Connecticut atmosphere. Maybe you can turn off the AC and avoid a myocardial infarction anyway.
     Maybe it will be the letter from your heating company stating what they intend to ask for fuel oil this winter. If you have an extra $3,000 or $4,000 maybe you can install natural gas heat and avoid atrial fibrillation….

     Look, there are a lot of good reasons…  to resume exploration and drilling. I can think of several off hand:

1. We don’t have to send troops overseas to defend oil we drill for in the U.S.
2. We don’t have to come hat-in-hand to ask a king, sheik or emir for extra oil.
3. Oil drilled offshore does not have to travel thousands of miles at risk of spilling.
4. The current oil leases don’t have very much oil. We have to find new oil fields.
5. Although some wells will take 10 years to produce, others will take as little as one.
6. We are running out of oil in the wells we already have open and we’ll have to start drilling new wells soon just to stay even.
7. Dollars are not exported out of the U.S. for domestic oil. This will strengthen the dollar.
8. The new oil will buy us a little breathing space to bring wind power on line for 20 percent of our electricity generation.

     What drilling will not do is make oil companies “rich.”  …Most oil companies are not the private domain of a Rockefeller. The owners of Exxon Mobil are investors in mutual funds and institutions. Vanguard Fund is prominent as is College Retirement Equities, Washington Mutual Investors Fund, and so forth. These represent thousands of people, all with a share of equity in the business. The profits pay their retirement bills and are plowed back into the business.
     I suppose hitting the oil companies with a windfall profits tax will make some people feel good. But as with all such taxes, the people paying the tax will be the people who buy gas and oil for fuel: you and me.

     Just to be fair… oil prices did not give me a heart attack. Lots of things did. The timing was just …very apt.

A reader remarks…

     What about the argument that the oil companies are not drilling on leased areas as it is and the deregulation of futures speculation (Enron loophole) that has also contributed to driving up the price of oil? Why wont US oil companies get oil from South America or Canada? Why does most of the oil have to be bought from OPEC?
     Seems there's more to it than the offshore drilling solution… Not that I am against it, because I am for it. But that is only part of the solution on Middle East oil dependence.
     Actually, we need a mix of traditional and new energy sources (natural gas, solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric as well as coal and oil) to gain our independence from foreign oil. Germany is leading the way in this area, with legal mandates and tax incentives for the adoption of wind, hydroelectric, geothermal and solar heat. Google the city of Freiburg and you’ll find a town that makes so much of it’s own energy that it has a surplus the citizens sell at a profit to the national grid. They have homes that lose so little heat they can be warmed comfortably in the dead of winter using 30 lit candles and the trapped heat the occupants give off. So yes, there is more to the solution than drilling.
    But when President Bush lifted the executive ban on offshore drilling yesterday the price of oil futures dropped by $9 a barrel, finally stabilizing at a net reduction of $7.33 by the end of trading. Supply and Demand. What do you think would happen to the price of oil if Congress followed suit?
    Right now there are oil fields off California that, if opened back up for drilling, would produce oil in one year. Other areas will take much longer to develop, but we are looking at the possibility of almost immediate relief.
    If there is oil to be had on the leased land I think the oil companies would be drilling for it right now, given the price per barrel. I suspect most of that leased land is not as promising to yield oil as the outer continental shelf, our western oil shale and the ANWR deposits.
    I’ve heard that speculation adds from 40 to 80 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline. This may well be. On the other hand –and hear me out on this— the speculators, oil futures buyers, provide a valuable service. There is competition among nations to buy oil. India wants it and so does China. The futures buyers secure a reliable supply for U.S. end users. In other words, they make sure that when we turn the car on, there’s gas in the tank. The $4.50 a gallon is the price of buying the gas in a competitive world market. Once again, supply and demand.
    If you look into whom the futures buyers are, you won’t find a crew of buccaneers like Enron. You will find pension funds and public employee unions.
     We do, in fact get oil from Canada, which has the biggest deposit of tar sand in the world. The oil is processed out of that material, which is mined. Our South American supplier is Venezuela, which is run by our adversary Hugo Chavez, who is every bit as obnoxious as any Arab oil sheik ever thought of being.
    So I’m with you. Let’s drill and let’s diversify our energy portfolio. That is a solution that is truly pragmatic and truly progressive.

Burning food in a hungry world…

     Count me out when it comes to ethanol, however. In a world where starving children bloat up and are too week to brush the flies off their own faces, it is a grotesquely selfish and ultimately obscene act to take edible corn and turn it into fuel for SUVs. By 2015 as much as half of the U.S. corn crop could be going into ethanol production. What will this do to the price of animal feed? Meat and milk prices are already rising, what about the thousand-and-one other food products made directly or indirectly from corn?
     We Americans can afford a bigger food bill. What about the less fortunate peoples of the world? What are they to do when food is either too expensive or unavailable at any price? It is something to think about as we crank up the air conditioning in our SUVs this summer.    

Mr. Obama goes to Washington…by way of Baghdad

     Barack Obama is going to Iraq. The only question is …why? The answer is far from obvious because Obama went to some pains yesterday to say that the war in Iraq was a strategic mistake and it’s the war in Afghanistan that we absolutely, positively must win.
    There was no hint that Obama planned to modify or refine his position on the war for any reason. That’s because his net roots are being especially vigilant in examining anything he says about the conflict for signs of a shift to the center.
     This puts Obama –ahem!— between Iraq and a hard place because while the Democratic primary candidates bickered earlier this year about who would get us out of Iraq the fastest, the Surge worked and we more or less won the war. The terrorists have not been completely eliminated, but they hold no cities, Al Qaida in Iraq has been reduced by about 90 percent and the Iraq army is taking on more and more responsibility in the conflict.
    This calls for at least for a more nuanced approach to withdrawal by the Democratic standard-bearer. But with a civil war brewing on his own website over his shifts to the center on faith-based programs, gun rights and immunity for the telecoms who helped the government wiretap terrorists, Obama cannot move to the center on the war. He cannot cross the Netroots on the signature issue of the campaign.
    So if going to Iraq is not going to change his mind on policy, what’s the point? Frequent flyer miles? Or the excellent roast lamb they serve in Baghdad?