WSJ: Obama May Back Off Opposition to Offshore Drilling

[Leopolds Ghost]

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/08/01/obama-may-back-off-opposition-to-offshore-drilling/

August 1, 2008, 6:55 pm

Obama May Back Off Opposition to Offshore Drilling

Amy Chozick reports on the presidential race.

Barack Obama signaled Friday that he may back off his fervent opposition to expanding offshore drilling.

Obama told a Florida newspaper that he would be willing to support limited drilling if it was required in order to enact a comprehensive alternative energy plan.

“My interest is in making sure we’ve got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices,” Obama said in an interview with The Palm Beach Post.

“If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage — I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done.”

The statement comes after Obama has spent weeks criticizing John McCain over his vow to expand drilling. Obama has said further drilling would not relieve Americans from record-high gas prices or help cut down on our appetite for foreign oil.

His staunch opposition to offshore drilling has not been polled well but he has stood by the issue and has used it as a symbol to highlight that he does not base every decision on what is politically popular.

In a statement about the recent “Gang of Ten Bipartisan Energy Plan” to reduce gas prices Obama said “I remain skeptical that new offshore drilling will bring down gas prices in the short-term or significantly reduce our oil dependence in the long-term, though I do welcome the establishment of a process that will allow us to make future drilling decisions based on science and fact.”

Obama has always said that he supports expanded drilling in existing open areas, which include offshore areas. His campaign figures there are 68 million acres currently open that are not being drilled on by oil companies. He opposes lifting the moratorium on drilling in the outer continental shelf.

[Cassandra]

1. Drill with what?

there still aren't any drilling platforms available anywhere in the world.

[Leopolds Ghost]

4. And the more expensive the gas gets, the lower the EROEI of manufacturing a $50Bn drilling platform.

That's $50Bn in last month's dollars, not this month's...

[Leopolds Ghost]

2. Actually I can see where Obama is coming from on this. I would agree except....

But the half-measures or counter-productive anti-environmental "solutions"
he is likely to accept in return for drilling in ANWR are going to be very
small, because both sides of Congress are willing to:

** Ban the construction of rapid transit in major US cities

** Focus all mass transit income on trolleys and buses to save money

** Spend all money on road construction

** Spend all energy dollars on ethanol and "clean" Coal to Liquids
and massive electricity-consuming hydrogen conversion
("alternative energy" according to any US government metric)
to power a new fleet of US cars even bigger than the one today

** Build a lot of nuke plants and power lines that will suck up all
the voltage

** Strip-mine the North American West

** Double US electricity consumption to power cars

** Double US coal consumption as a "clean" stopgap by
tearing down mountains and using the holes as carbon sinks

** Pretend solar carrying capacity can run the US/world economy
while all our manufacturing is banned in places like
"green design" Greensburg KS (a model US city featured on
the Green channel that dezoned industry out of the center
of town in order to "think green") so we continue to live
lifestyles powered entirely by Chinese coal

** Pretend we are not running out of gas and that speculators
have solved the problem now that gas is "returning" to $98

** Call it a day

Once again "so-called liberals" (who are actually center-right
even by standards of the Red Scare) are willing to accept
half-measures and be the first to compromise and will end up
with less and less because they don't know how to play their
bargaining chips (like selective off-shore drilling).

[Leopolds Ghost]

6. Oh and did I mention carbon pollution tax and cap, which prez of Sumitomo Chem said was insufficient

That places the president of Sumitomo Chemical in Japan, a major oil byproducts manufacturer, and many other Japanese to the left of Al Gore. And they actually still bother to manufacture stuff while we want to continue shipping all our manufacturing off-shore, thereby reaping billions of dollars from a global tax-and-cap incentive by using it to offshore all our manufacturing (which both candidates in the recent primaries assured us was in some way regrettable but inevitable.) Unlike Kerry, who I am beggining to think was the last chance this country had for a baby boomer generation to actually elect a liberal president, I never liked Gore and Clinton's neoliberal, privatization model for Kyoto etc. In fact, did you know Clinton signed the Enron bill? It was CLINTON'S adopted vision to deregulate all the markets and let industry trade pollution credits. The left savaged Gore for that, one of the reasons he was considered an unpopular centrist in the 1990s. Nobody remembers that, now that he has embraced the left as a sort of William Jennings Bryan figure, but like Bryan, Gore's positions are squarely in the center of world opinion on this issue. Like Hilary, he has a strong stance on a left issue, but his proposed solution is center-right.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. Apparantly, changing his position to match McCain's qualifies as "change".

Although, some would call it pandering to the right.

[Doctor_J]

5. It's getting more difficult to see how he's going to win in November

how can he make it to the finish line while constantly backpedaling? :shrug:

[texastoast]

7. Well, double damn fuck

I hope it is just lip service.

[Leopolds Ghost]

8. Like I said, I would be willing to bargain away some drilling rights

THIS is NOT the way you bargain OR get anything out of your own party,
which opposes serious investment in mass transit -- much less the opposition.

The opposition is in a position of weakness. You sit back and appear
magnanimous and let them meet YOU halfway after you're elected god-dammit.

Hell, he wants to model after Reagan's tactical politics, Reagan was the
master of this. He bargained away half of his agenda with Tip O'Niell
and amassed the other half plus a vast reserve of political capital which
the Republicans used after Clinton got elected and bargained away the
entire New Deal -- banking deregulation, energy deregulation, the end
of welfare, deliberate demolition of all publically owned housing,
telecom deregulation, the woiks. Will we get more of the same from the
next President?

It doesn't matter if Obama is DLC if he agrees with Rahm on everything.