Headline Innuendo-"Deep Boat"

Apparently one of our state's competitive grants for filmmaking has gone to a porn producer and the people are loving it. The State featured an article today entitled "Polls Find Deep Support for Drilling". I didn't bother to read the article, but from the headline, it's clear that "Drilling" is going to be a hit at the, wherever pornos are shown publicly place.

But on a more serious note, aren't we deluding ourselves a bit here people? I mean there's only about 20 billion barrels of oil out there. We use 20 million barrels every day. By my calculation, that keeps us burning that sweet sweet crude for only about another 3 years or so. Then we're right back where we started. Oh, and did I mention that it's going to take anywhere from 6 to 12 years to get the stuff on the market. Oh yeah, and it turns out that hurricanes come through a lot of those areas pretty regularly. Remember what Katrina and Rita did to gas prices? Oh yeah, and for those of you prone to hug a tree every now and then, it turns out that offshore drilling carries with it a significant risk of dumping a bunch of that black gold into the ocean and killing a whole bunch of animals, some of which we like to eat. Ooh, ooh, and I almost forgot to mention that pursuing this false solution is going to delay market forces that are driving innovation in new technologies to reduce our dependence on oil.

In sum, it seems like the whole offshore drilling debate is not much more than a red herring. My vote is to increase research spending on the stuff that can get us out of this mess permanently before we end up driving our cars like Fred Flintstone.