The oil will not go away if we don't drill for it today. Offshore oil will stay just where it is, ready to be drilled for in the future.
Press coverage of the offshore drilling has been reductionist, yet ignores this simple fact: "McCain proposed lifting the ban on offshore drilling last week as part of his plan to reduce dependence on foreign oil and help combat rising gas prices." By contrast, Obama opposes lifting the ban on offshore drilling. The line of attacks against the McCain position have been that the environmental risks are too high, and the benefits (other than purely psychological ones) would take decades to be seen.
This is approach is a mistake. We are mistaken if we think the only way to win this argument is by changing the minds of those who think the environment must always take a back seat to short term human needs. More importantly, the argument that offshore drilling with oil delivery following decades later provides only psychological benefits in the near term is wrong. The Republicans analyze it using an economic approach that seems sound at first glance: If you have a scarce good, and you know more of that good will be introduced into the market in the future, the value of the good even today (especially among speculators) will go down. To illustrate with something more concrete, imagine if it were announced that a deposit of gold had been discovered that will yield ten times the current global amount of gold that had ever been mined, but that the gold would take ten years to extract and come to market. Gold prices would immediately plunge -- even though gold stocks will remain stable for the ten years it takes to recover the huge new stockpile. The Republican mode of analysis seems rather straightforward. However, like most things Republican, even when the mode of analysis is sensible, the Republicans have drawn the wrong conclusion.
In the case of oil, our offshore reserves will not disappear if we do not drill them today. Let me say that again, because this is the key point: A barrel of oil left in the ground, on property that the United States owns, will stay in the ground until we get it. More to the point, if we were to drill that oil out fifty years from now, improvements in technology will inevitably make extraction safer, more efficient, and less dangerous to the environment than it is today. And to top it off, if we learn that we do not need to drill it out (perhaps as a result of breakthroughs in clean energy), we don't have to. Additionally, the fact that the oil is there and recoverable is enough to create downward price pressure on oil (although less than if the oil were being extracted).
By contrast, wind and solar energy will disappear unless we use them. All the sunlight falling to earth today represents a lost opportunity. As we burn oil or coal to run our air conditioners, we cannot unburn the coal and use today's sunlight in the future.
In light of this, the economic method the Republicans have been using argues strongly in favor of a policy of conserve, develop alternatives, and make clear that we view offshore oil as a massive strategic reserve, only to be drilled in the event of a simultaneous catastrophic failure in conservation, alternative energy, and global markets.
Obama's position on oil is correct: We should not take steps to drill for oil in environmentally sensitive areas. Nobody has asked him the follow up question -- though I know he will answer that one correctly: "Are you taking offshore drilling off the table under all circumstances at all times in future?" The answer, of course, is that "offshore oil remains a valuable strategic reserve, and we can and will drill for it if it if our primary goals of conservation and development of alternative energy sources have failed to yield adequate timely results."
Maybe even McCain can figure this out given the right analogy: You have a piece of oily, polluting cake on the table. You also have every reason to believe there will be plenty of other, better tasting and healthier cakes in the refrigerator. Do you eat the cake on the table before you check out the refrigerator, just in case the refrigerator is empty? Or do you go to the refrigerator first, knowing that the cake on the table is not going anywhere?
