Drill

I've made the claim before, that biofuels are a profoundly unethical thing. Evil, even, as far as things can be evil. We here in America may not quite get the point. What, food is being wasted? -- used for cars instead of people? Big deal. We have plenty of food, and if it gets more expensive, we'll just spend more for it. It's a bother, but we can always pinch pennies by cutting back on our vacation time.

The problem is in those little-brown-man lands, where they're already all so skinny, and food prices are doubling and tripling and octifying and dodecaplating. I don't mean ice cream. I mean rice. The staples. Forget about the precious CO2-reducing rainjungles being razed: farmland is being used to grow biofuels instead of people food. Supply and demand. So, hunger and food riots. What do you do, when you can't afford FOOD? Profoundly unethical, these biofuels. Evil.

And they're not even efficient. And they're more expensive than fossil fuels.

Drill drill drill. Yes, inflate your tires, but drill. They object that it would take 10 years, or that it would be only a few percentage points of increase? Perhaps. How would you or I know. But we know phony-sounding excuses when we hear them. Yeah, sure, honey, here's all these reason why I couldn't have been cheating on you. You can't put your finger on the lie, but you know it's there. They don't want to drill because they, what ... hate the American way of life? Want to control mobility? Honestly believe in catastrophic anthropogenic Global Warming? I don't know. Real motives are hard to pin down. But it's clear they hate oil. It's like hating blood -- not spilled blood, not violence -- circulating, life's blood. What else is it that keeps our civilization going? An appreciation of Chaucer?

We know that it's just a few percentage points that makes the difference between shortage and abundance. The perception of sufficiency is enough to ensure it. Hoarding breeds hoarding. So of course increasing supply will have a good effect on prices. No duh. And you know even the enviropols secretly understand. Why else are they calling for increased output from the Arabs? They want Arab drilling, but not home drilling? So we can bleed money into the Middle East? Yet they object to the billions of aid to Iraq? Doesn't add up. It's not about the money, to them. It's more of that love-the-enemy, hate-yourself stuff. They must think that's what being Christian is.

The Left forbids American drilling on the continental shelf, while alien powers can drill there? The Left turns a blind eye to increased drilling in Third World hell holes that have no safety standards to speak of, while forbiding drilling by Americans, who have the highest safety standards and best record in the world? Something doesn't add up. It's not drilling itself that they're against. What, then, are they against? Well, those greedy Americans. They're all so wasteful and greedy.

Will increased supply encourage stupid Americans to continue their filthy wasteful ways? -- and I am quite serious here. I think a line has been crossed. It's not like the 70s, when we still supplied most of our oil. Now it's so clearly a matter of security. Shipping boatloads of money to our likely enemies, so we can burn up the product we buy. Seems insane to me. Couldn't we do some good at home, if we kept that money at home? Seems like the WalMart Syndrome at work here -- support hometown business. We understand now that China is Olympian, and India is multifoliate. Things can never be the same. Conservation, of course. That's what Conservative is. We'll get it.

Charles Krauthammer has it right again, of course. Obama asserts that by inflating our tires "we could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling." Um, no? "By any reasonable calculation of annual tire-inflation and tune-up savings," says Krauthammer, "the Outer Continental Shelf holds nearly a hundred times as much oil. As for oil shale, also under federal moratorium, after a thousand years of driving with Obama-inflated tires and Obama-tuned engines, we would still have saved only one-fifth the oil shale available in the United States."

Obama and his camp try to laugh us off. How stupid we are, to insist on not inflating our tires. We almost want to run our cars on the rims, is how dumb we are, us with our black coal fires and Industrial Revolution rickets. But our objection is regarding matters of fact. Do what we can. This includes both proper tire inflation AND drilling. It's not an either-or propostion -- I see Krauthammer uses the same phrasing. It's obvious enough to arrive at independently.

Here's a good point Krauthammer makes that wouldn't have occurred to me: "Congressional Democrats demand instead a clampdown on "speculators." The Democrats proposed this a month ago. In the meantime, "speculators" have driven the price down by $25 a barrel. Still want to stop them? In what universe do traders only bet on the price going up?" I wish I was Charles Krauthammer. Jack the Kraut Hammer! Yeah ... yeah.

"...drilling requires no government program, no newly created bureaucracy, no pie-in-the-sky technologies that no one has yet invented. It requires only one thing, only one act. Lift the moratorium. Private industry will do the rest. And far from draining the treasury, it will replenish it with direct taxes, and with the indirect taxes from the thousands of non-subsidized new jobs created."

But that would be good for ourselves, and we must understand that part of being Christian is to work against our own self-interest.

I think I'll become Moslem.


J