Charita Goshay: Offshore drilling aside, let's reduce oil dependence

The current fervor for offshore oil drilling is a lot like taking off your shoes at the airport: It may offer a measure of comfort, but it really doesn’t fix the problem.

Experts say it takes about seven years to glean any benefit from offshore drilling, so even if it began today, you won’t see cheaper prices tomorrow; in fact, you may not see any savings. You don’t really expect Big Oil to foot the bill for it, do you?

If Washington truly was serious about breaking our addiction, George W. Bush would have declared on Sept. 12, 2001: “Our energy independence from the Middle East begins today. I’m asking Congress to lift the offshore drilling ban, with the caveat that what’s tapped here, stays here.”

Highest bidder

If the Democratic-led Congress had priorities other than making Bush look bad, it would threaten to refuse to renew leases for the 68 million acres the oil industry rents from the government, which includes 40 million acres in the Gulf.

It would prioritize expansion and improvement of public transportation systems such as Amtrak, which is running on fumes.

This isn’t an argument against offshore drilling. It’s simply to say that, like much of life, it’s a lot more complicated than what we’re hearing in sound bites. For instance, there’s no guarantee that if the ban is lifted, the oil will remain in the United States. American oil companies don’t wrap their derricks in the flag.

They’re international conglomerates beholden to stockholders to sell their product to the highest bidder, period.

Manhattan Project

Even if we drilled a hole in every back yard in America -- we already have 510,000 domestic wells -- our reserves still would stand at 3 percent of the world’s supply.

The Middle East’s stands at 65 percent, so the answer is not simply finding more oil, but consuming less.

At 20 million barrels per day, we consume one-fourth of the planet’s daily oil output. We drink more oil than the next five consumer nations combined.

We can’t keep feeding this addiction because it forces us to stay in shotgun marriages with countries and governments who never have our best interest at heart, and requires us to turn a blind eye to their abominable human-rights and environmental abuses.

That is why the development of energy alternatives should be conferred the status of a Manhattan Project.

When the U.S. was attacked at Pearl Harbor, companies such as Hoover and Timken answered the call, transforming themselves virtually overnight from manufacturers of consumer goods to integral partners in the war effort.

Unlike our parents and grandparents, we have not been called upon to save the world. Uncoupling ourselves from those who neither like nor respect us is this generation’s call to arms.

Reach Canton Repository writer Charita M. Goshay at (330) 580-8313 or e-mail: charita.goshay@cantonrep.com