Pelosi’s logic fails to impress
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
Those criticizing President Bush’s lifting of the presidential ban on offshore drilling, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are saying that offshore drilling now would do nothing to lower present gasoline prices, and would only start doing us some good eight or 10 years from now.
That is a laughable objection. What Rep. Pelosi and those who agree with her actually are saying is that if the ban had been lifted 10 years ago, we would have the oil now, and perhaps prices of gasoline wouldn’t be so high.
Drilling for oil, or building nuclear plants, or putting in wind farms, or laying out solar arrays only deliver benefits in the future. The solar array in the Mojave Desert that is churning out electricity every time the sun shines is only benefiting us now because it was built about 20 years ago. The windmill farms on the coast ranges and over the Tehachapis are giving us power because somebody put them in and got them going many years ago. The nuclear plants which turn out about 20 percent of our electricity only do so because people did the work and paid the money 30, even 40 years ago.
Surely Rep. Pelosi and those who agree with her understand this, and also understand that future energy depends on present effort and present investment.
It’s all very nice to wring one’s hands and talk about how we need to get more electric cars on the road, but it’s also very nice to lay the foundation now for where all that electricity to run all those cars will come from.
A megawatt of power will operate about 750 homes, 500 during cooling season. If each of those homes had two plug-in cars, two megawatts would be required. And right now, we are using just about all the electricity we generate. We need to drill now, and build now, or our grandkids will hate us.
