Energy Politics

Presidential candidate Barack Obama is backing limited offshore drilling and tapping reserves, which I suppose is a step in the right direction for him. But he’s pulling out that old political chestnut that he can get us off of foreign oil supplies in 10 years.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Obama’s voter friendly rhetoric is the same well-meaning promise that every president since Richard Nixon has promised since the 1970. It certainly plays to our national myths of self-stability, but not to the realities of a country that has 300 million citizens, many of which rely on automobiles both for personal transportation but also for delivery of goods and services.

With money we spend on oil being funneled to terrorists and other political extremists in the Middle East as well as our own hemisphere, it certainly is a noble goal to limit capital access to people who want to kill us, or at the very least overthrow our system and replace it with something straight out of Dark Ages. But it’s an empty promise. We need oil too much. Our own oil reserves are too small to sustain us, and all the easy-to-get-to oil proved reserves in friendly countries are too small. It’s a sad fact of life that most of the world’s crude lies in countries who don’t favor democracy or the free market,  and we have to deal with that.

So if you want to believe Obama when he says we can get off of oil in 10 years, fine. I’m sure McCain will be making that same argument soon, if he hasn’t already. I suppose if it were going to happen, it might be now, with all the added emphasis on energy conservation and seeking out viable alternative fuels. But odds are it’s just as reliable as George H. W. Bush’s promises that involved reading his lips. You know how that turned out.

–Stephen Payne, Editor, Oil and Gas Investor This Week; www.OilandGasInvestor.com; spayne@hartenergy.com

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