Don't listen to all the naysayers – like Barack Obama – who try to convince you that drilling for oil here or sinking a well there will only impact the price of gas at the pump by “a few pennies a gallon,” and won't have any impact for many years to come. If we hadn't had our heads buried up our asses for the last forty years, we would be energy independent today and we wouldn't be facing the crisis we find ourselves in.
Gas is $4 a gallon. Oil is $135 a barrel and rising. We import two-thirds of our oil, sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the likes of Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. And yet we voluntarily prohibit ourselves from even exploring huge domestic reserves of petroleum and natural gas.
At a time when U.S. crude oil production has fallen 40 percent in the past 25 years, 75 billion barrels of oil have been declared off-limits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That would be enough to replace every barrel of non-North American imports (oil trade with Canada and Mexico is a net economic and national security plus) for 22 years.
That's nearly a quarter-century of energy independence. “But even if we started drilling today, we wouldn't realize any savings for at least a decade,” they whine. The same whine we've been hearing now for four decades.
Drill here. Drill now. Let them whine.
