Drill Obama Drill

Watch Obama's State of the Union Address by clicking on the video above.

I came back from my first day of class at George Mason feeling pretty excited. Our political climate has been more conducive to justice and the everyday Schmendrick has been getting their fair shake. Europe has pledged to stop using Iran as its source of oil and the embargo will begin fully in six months, effectively cutting Iran’s oil sales by 20 percent. (Assuming Latin America and China don’t fill the void).

Anyhow, with the Keystone XL Pipeline permit being denied, catch limits on fish being carved out, and NOAA being put into the Department of Interior as it should have been in the 1970s, I thought that things were looking pretty good for us environmentalists out there. Then I read the State of the Union. (I wanted to watch it, but it turns out if you miss the State of the Union and there’s damn punditry going on afterwards, all the online sources stream to the damn punditry.)

So it turns out that Obama’s energy plan is to open up 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. He also wants to keep launching into using natural gas. Apparently the US is endowed with a 100 year supply of natural gas. (By the way we possess two percent of the world’s oil reserves.) Anyhow, I can understand why it makes sense to drill here, and though I am an environmentalist, I get the pinch we’re facing right now for oil and the problems that arise from funding oil despots overseas. However, I think Obama is a coward for not even mentioning the responsibility we face for climate change. Re-election’s got him backed into a corner and whimpering. 

If I were him, and I had no reasonable alternative but to open up our offshore oil wells, at least I would make a trade of some sort. I’d also bring home the fact that this measure is dire and only being done as a short term concession for a global crisis and offer up a trade.  He could have used this moment to start the first stages of a cap-and-trade system, where carbon emissions are traded as a commodity and their revenue goes toward funding a renewable energy system. He threw an ace card away. 

In his defense, Obama is pushing to expand clean energy. He aims to double US investment in clean energy (which isn’t much comparatively) and provide enough clean energy to power the equivalent of 3 million homes.

Ahhh, I want to love the guy, but he just lost a lot of momentum that he recently accumulated. It didn’t have to be that way. 

I highly recommend reading the State of the Union Address.