Let’s say you are running for president and you tell everyone that you think offshore drilling would take years to do anything about gas prices, then 30 days later you suddenly say that drilling would help in the short term…what do you think it would take to publicly contradict yourself on an issue like that?
Could it be MONEY, and lots of it? I think it could.
Campaign contributions from oil industry executives to Sen. John McCain rose dramatically in the last half of June, after the senator from Arizona made a high-profile split with environmentalists and reversed his opposition to the federal ban on offshore drilling.
Oil and gas industry executives and employees donated $1.1 million to McCain last month — three-quarters of which came after his June 16 speech calling for an end to the ban — compared with $116,000 in March, $283,000 in April and $208,000 in May.(via the WaPo)
Offshore drilling is still a stupid idea, even if John McCain has been bribed into changing his mind.
Saying that that some oil from ANWR or offshore may be exported or it wont lower gas prices is a very stupid reason for not drilling there! Take an class in economics. If we export a million barrels from ANWR and import a million barrels from somewhere else, it costs us nothing. If we import a million barrels and export none it costs us 140 million dollars! Research and development of alternative energy sources is great and we should do that, but as long as we are useing more oil than we are producing we need to drill as much as possible. If we end up with more oil than we need we can sell it to China to pay for all our imported lead painted toys!
Democrats say drilling would not help because we wont get the oil for 10 years, a great argument they have been making for a decade – jay Leno
The point is, even if we drill up the oil (all of it) it will provide a very small amount of oil, wont really effect the cost of gas, and has devastating effects on our environment. Drilling for oil is a silly negative sum game that we have been playing for too long.