The only thing your oil does is make your state revenue from the lease and give your people jobs. Oil is a fungible resource sold on the open market. Any oil drilled in the US doesnt automatically go into the strategic oil reserve or into americans gas tanks. If all oil production was stopped in the us the price of oil internationally and here in the US would not go up more than 3-5 percent.
I would be willing to wager that almost all oil produced in the Gulf goes into American gas tanks. I would also be willing to wager that almost all oil produced in the states goes into American gas tanks. We do export petroleum products but mostly to Mexico because they don't have the refining capabilities. They sell us a shitload of oil and in return we refine some of it and sell it back to them.
It is simply an economic reason. It is cheaper to pump the oil into existing pipeline infrastructure and straight to the refineries than it is to pump it onto a ship and send it elsewhere.
Whats funny about the knee jerk comment is that conservation and protecting our environment is not knee jerk, it was a cause championed by one of our greatest presidents, Teddy Roosevelt.
I truly feel for the people that work in the oil industry here in the US. My wife's grandfather was an oil man for shell back in the day. Before he died we talked about the state of oil here in the us and he compared it to the steel industry....dying and soon dead......
The oil industry has been BOOMING. At one point when oil was cheap as hell it was in a state of decline and it hasn't been doing all that well lately but over the last decade its been booming. The 33 (nearly 1/4 of the entire worlds supply) deepwater rigs currently operating in the Gulf is proof. As far as protecting our environment, stopping drilling doesn't really do that.
A few 100 miles from the oil spill is this place called Port Fourchon and it is home to the LOOP (Louisiana Offshore Oil Port). It is the only port in the United States that is capable of servicing and offloading VLCCs and ULCCS (Very large and Ultra Large Crude Carriers) which is how we will be receiving any additional oil we have to import. Our neighbors to the north and south are already selling us all they can spare and shipping it through pipelines. Everything else has to come by boat and those supertankers I mentioned above carry 2-3 MILLION barrels of crude. Every additional ship you require to enter the Gulf raises the risk that something can go wrong and we can have a spill every bit as bad as this one (potentially much worse). Then you have the entire national security thing and being drug into wars to protect our oil supply that I have outlined in many other threads.
We haven't had an accident like this in the Gulf ever and we have thousands upon thousands of wells and even more holes drilled. Drilling can be done safely and in an environmentally friendly way, the gang of 66 plan is the best I have heard at ensuring that happens.
Mark my words, we will still consume just as much oil and if our economy is growing we will consume even more. We can either try to keep as much money here in the states and create as many jobs as possible in a safe manner, or we can increase our risk of fighting more wars to protect our oil supplies that come from unstable regions (and can not replace, regardless of what you think). You don't think we have fought two wars in the mid east because we like the people over there or something? You don't think we are so nice to Saudi Arabia because they are our best buds do you? I wonder if Mexico (Our 2nd largest supplier of petroleum) has better regulations and enforcement agencies (like the EPA) than we do? Or do you only care about OUR environment and think that we should push others to drill for more oil and potentially fuck their environment up so you can have that fancy computer, cell phone, go-go juice for your car, nat gas for your electricity, fertilizer for your food, etc....
Like it or not we need oil to get us another 20 years down the road maybe 30. There is no reason we shouldn't be able to transition off of oil as a transportation fuel in that time if we try (and eventually we will, might not be this year or next but eventually we will). We should have spent the stimulus on upgrading the grid, that would have been a huge step in putting the infrastructure in place that will likely be required for the transition (not to mention distributed power, less wasted electricity and a host of other benefits) but we didn't. Now it will likely be a much much slower process due to the sheer cost of rebuilding most of the nations electrical infrastructure.
