"Democrats Reluctantly Embrace Offshore Drilling"

- New York Times article by Carl Hulse - September 11, 2008

This article was examining the shift in the Democrat's long-held reticence to offshore drilling. According to the article, the position was acceded only under the condition that it would be combined with a host of clean-energy initiatives.

"Ms. Pelosi and her fellow Democrats say that they are making the change reluctantly but that the political climate rendered it impossible to try to retain the drilling ban this year. So rather than see the moratorium expire and open the way to drilling as close as three miles from the coast, they said they were pushing any drilling at least 50 miles offshore, requiring states to agree to it and tying the whole package to a series of clean energy initiatives that have so far languished in Congress."

By this excerpt, it becomes clear that instead of struggling to contain the growing pressure to expand oil production, the Democrats have cunningly seized this opportunity and are using it to advance some of their own aims (renewable energy). I chose this article not only because it was interesting, but because it coincidentally paralleled some of our recent classroom discussions. Close to the beginning of the school year in our biology class we read a paper on the pros and cons of oil drilling off the American coast. The paper was most illuminating, because it examined not only the increased oil production the drilling would yield, but also the dangers of offshore drilling and what would be required to construct enough platforms to make the effort worthwhile, among other scraps of logistical data. According to the paper, even if construction began today it would be 2017 before any platforms would be operational. Also according to the paper, offshore drilling can result in ecological calamities of a far-reaching nature (oil spills) that can occur either as petroleum is loaded onto cargo ships, by some sort of equipment failure, or by a leak in the concrete and steel umbilical that connects a rig to the ocean floor. In addition to their potential for spill-based catastrophes, drilling platforms can leak heavy metals into the water, potentially poisoning the food chain (which we rely on as much as sharks and other aquatic predators). Though it is true that the technology behind today's drilling platform is of a considerably higher standard than it was when the practice was in its infancy, the extraction of oil deposits from the bottom of the sea possesses an inherently dangerous quality that can never be fully suppressed, both for the environment and those working on the rig.