Obama has opportunity to reverse mistake on offshore drilling

By
Mark Weisbrot                                                                 Read Spanish Version

Campaigning
in Florida last June as a presidential candidate, then-Senator Barack
Obama blasted the proposal of his opponent, Senator John McCain, to
open coastal areas of the United States to offshore drilling.
Declaring that it “makes no sense at all,” Obama correctly stated
that such drilling would make very little difference in the price of
gasoline, and supported a reduction of fossil fuel use through a
stimulus program that would create “green jobs.”
But
as gasoline prices soared past $4 a gallon and the Republicans
campaigned on the issue of “drill here, drill now,” the
Democratic leadership softened its position. The end result was that
a 27-year ban on drilling in coastal areas off the United States was
allowed to expire.

President
Obama now has an opportunity to reverse this mistake by
re-instituting the prior protection of our coastal
environment.

Offshore
drilling has resulted in millions of gallons of oil spills and other
forms of pollution. The expansion of offshore drilling is widely seen
as a threat to the coastal environment, as well as tourism and
fishing industries. It is also a misplaced priority, given the need
for the development of renewable energy, increased energy efficiency,
and other solutions that will slow the pace of global climate
change.

The
way in which the ban on offshore drilling was allowed to expire
offers a remarkable case study in the techniques of modern political
manipulation. Perhaps even more striking is the way in which the
major media outlets enabled this mass deception to succeed, by
shirking their fundamental responsibility to report the most relevant
facts.

The
McCain campaign took advantage of voters’ anger over rising
gasoline prices with attack ads directly blaming Obama. "Gas
prices — $4, $5, no end in sight, because some in Washington are
still saying no to drilling in America," blared one influential
McCain TV ad.

McCain
made offshore drilling a major issue in the campaign at the time. But
there was no empirical basis for the idea that lifting the ban on
offshore drilling would significantly affect gasoline prices.
Projections from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information
Agency (EIA) found that such drilling would increase world production
by about one-fifth of one percent — twenty years from now. The EIA
concluded that this was too small to have any significant effect on
oil prices.

But
most Americans would never get this information. Of 267 major
television programs that mentioned the proposed drilling between June
16 and August 9, 2008, only one cited the EIA finding.

As
a result, the McCain effort succeeded in shaping public opinion. By
the end of July, 69 percent of respondents favored such expanded
drilling, and 51 percent said that they believed that “federal laws
that prohibit increased drilling for oil offshore or in wilderness
areas” were a “major cause of the recent increase in gasoline
prices.” The response of political candidates to the election-year
pressure of misinformed public opinion then led to the change in
policy.

But
Barack Obama emerged as the winner, and he now has the bully pulpit
as president and approval ratings over 80 percent. Gasoline prices
are back down to $2.07 a gallon. It shouldn’t be too difficult for
him, together with the Democratic Congressional leadership, to simply
explain the truth of the matter and re-institute the ban on offshore
drilling.

If
President Obama is to deliver on his promise of change, he will have
to correct a number of major mistakes that were based on the mass
dissemination of lies — including most obviously the Iraq war.
Restoring the protection of our coastal areas is an easy one. He
should do it immediately.

Mark
Weisbrot
is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in
Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the
University of Michigan. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social
Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and
has written numerous research papers on economic policy. He is also
president of Just
Foreign Policy.

Taken
from The Center for Economic and Policy Research website:
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/obama-has-opportunity-to-reverse-mistake-on-offshore-drilling/