Drill, baby, drill

When policy changes help us all

IT’S BEEN a while since we’ve heard this much alarum and blubbering from the usual suspects out to save the world from mankind. The last time we’ve heard this much panic may have been during the Great Cape Wind Emergency of the early 2000s.

Does anybody remember that critical turning point/crossroads/doomsday scenario? The Cape Wind Project was a proposed offshore wind farm that might have included environs such as Nantucket and Cape Cod. Folks from those precincts finally shouted down this never-never wind farm—a wind farm!—for many reasons, but one suspects the main reason was the location. Why, folks who live near Martha’s Vineyard shouldn’t have to see windmills in their scenic views.

They might interfere with yachting! (Yes, that was an argument.) Leave machinery like that for lesser types on the coasts of Louisiana and Texas. Eventually even the promise of “renewable energy” couldn’t beat out liberal snobbery.

The hysteria and trepidation from the panicky CNN types, but we repeat ourselves, was on full display again late last week as the current president vowed to change another hands-tying policy of his predecessor. This time, President Trump’s administration proposes to open most all coastal waters off the United States to oil drilling. Even off California and Florida.

The papers say the Interior Department is proposing auctioning off drilling rights in more than 90 percent of the U.S. outer shelf. This president is often quoted using superlatives to explain his policies, but this time they might be accurate. Those who know these things say no other administration has ever proposed so many lease sales in a single offshore drilling program.

“Under President Trump,” says his Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, “we are going to become the strongest energy superpower this world has ever known.” And he might just be right.

Gone are days of the energy crisis. We wonder if the kids even know what that is, or was. It might help them to go back and listen to the clips from the campaigns that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders ran in 2016. Both were still talking about the dangers of “peak oil,” as if they were reading from Jimmy Carter’s playbook 40 years earlier. And the lines were stale then. But we’re not running out of oil; as the Institute of Energy Research put it, we’re running into it.

But, as with vaudeville and rock ‘n’ roll, no act is bad enough not to warrant a farewell tour. Remember when Jimmy Carter accused his opponents of wanting to put up an oil derrick next to the Washington Monument? The opponents of self-sufficiency still cry bloody oil slick at the suggestion of more drilling. Instead, we were told, put on another sweater. Thankfully, Jimmy Carter isn’t in the White House any longer.

For the likes of We the American People, more drilling might well be great news in the years to come. The only bad news might be reserved for those rapacious oil sheiks or crazy dictators from oil-rich countries who have exploited the world’s addiction to oil for a generation now. If America becomes more and more self-sufficient when it comes to oil, then their worlds might fall apart. And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.

Any increase in the world’s oil production would naturally be followed by a drop in oil prices, which isn’t just good news for the American economy, but all economies. For as goes the United States in this matter, so goes the world. No wonder the stock market continues to grow. Investors look at the big picture, and it’s definitely acquiring a rosy glow.

Granted, more drilling in the United States might prove bad news for the old oil cartel, formally known as OPEC, which for as long as memory runneth not to the contrary has had the rest of the world by the throat, or rather the pipeline. And Vlad the Impaler, aka Vladimir Putin, might see a drop in his revenue, too. So much the better.

What a reversal of fortunes as dictatorships around the world face new competition from a free market now starting to overflow with oil and gas. And that market will only improve as more drilling leases are opened off America’s shores. This administration promised to loosen restrictions and regulations that were holding the economy back. It’s a promise it looks to keep.

The yachting clubs will just have to manage.