McCain and Bush, oil opportunists

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-ed-oil21-2008jun21,0,7675894.story

It's nonsense for them to use the run-up in gas prices as an excuse to advocate offshore drilling.
June 21, 2008

President Bush and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain both recently proposed an end to the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling. What's really needed, though, is a moratorium on worthless suggestions from politicians for lowering gas prices.

GOP leaders like Bush and McCain are rolling out their own nonsensical non-solutions to the energy crisis after the Senate this month beat back an equally ridiculous attempt at gas-pump pandering by Democrats. Their bill would have hampered investment in new supply by imposing a shortsighted windfall-profits tax on oil companies, and it might have set off a trade war by allowing the U.S. attorney general to sue OPEC on antitrust grounds. Fortunately for the country, it failed to win enough votes to avoid a filibuster.

Enter Bush, who on Wednesday said he would end his father's 1990 presidential moratorium on most coastal drilling if Congress would lift its own, separate ban. His reasoning was so contradictory that it's a wonder he could finish his news conference without cracking up. While conceding that the long-term solution to high oil prices is to pursue alternative energy sources, he argued that "in the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil, and that means we need to increase supply." The U.S. Energy Information Administration says that even if oil companies are allowed to tap the 18 billion barrels under coastal waters that are currently off-limits, oil prices wouldn't be expected to fall until 2030. How is that a short-term solution?