I'd love to think that if any good came out of the oil spill in the Gulf it might be someone will finally tell Sarah Palin to shut up and go home.
Drilling for more oil is not the short or long term solution to America's energy problems.
The technological marvel that is deepwater drilling is showing the dangerous side. If things go catastrophically wrong, there is pretty much nothing we can do about it quickly enough to stop massive environmental disasters.
President Obama correctly put other deepwater well's on hold until more is found out about what happened to cause this disaster and what can be done to prevent future ones.
Even if there is only a 1/10000th chance of this sort of thing happening again, can we risk it for the miniscule gain?
Don't kid yourselves, we cannot raise domestic production to levels that will make a difference. We can't drill fast enough to have any real effect on gas prices. The kicker is too, we have limited (and aging) refinery space to handle any new oil coming in. (This is a bottleneck that frequently drives up the price of oil.)
Oil is necessary, we aren't getting away from it anytime soon. But, if we keep feeding our addiction for little gain (except the pockets of large corporations) no real change is going to happen.
We MUST invest heavily in alternative fuel sources while creating incentives for people to carpool, use mass transit, or buy highly efficient small commuter vehicles.
Change is hard. But it must happen.
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