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Washington Times Pushes It’s Own Snake Oil

Lots of comment this morning, centered on the Washington Post Op-Ed [1]of yesterday, which spends it’s time destroying three basic arguments of those against offshore drilling.

However, it propagates a couple barrels of snake oil. The most offensive of the lot being that drilling would not affect prices today, and that it would be years before we’d see any price difference.

I’ve got news for Washington Post, And the New York Times [2](Particularly Bob Herbert) and for John Kerry Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and all the rest:

If you’re not lying about this, you do not understand how commodity futures work.  Moreover, you ignore the recent evidence. In any event, you’re dead wrong.

Contrary to the baldly political suggestions regarding lower gasoline prices by President Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), drilling would make no impact on today’s pain at the pump because it would be years before any oil flowed from the Outer Continental Shelf.

(Chuckle) Remember, dear reader, what I along about the end of last month, now, in describing the bubble bursting… an event I accurately predicted, by the way…:

Bush steps up before the mikes yesterday and says we gotta drill… open up offshore fields… and chides congress about opening up ANWR, and what happens? Price drops $9/bbl almost at once. That’s the biggest drop in the price of oil since 1991.

So, tell me again, oil haters, how our committing to drilling for our own oil, and freeing up domestic production, including ANWR, won’t have an immediate effect on the price of oil… even before such fields come online.

Here we have the mere spectre of a commitment by the US to drilling our own oil, and the price falls like it hasn’t in nearly 20 years.

Simply committing to drilling will cause the markets to react, at once. That  the WaPo denies the evdience it has in front of it on the matter is staggeringly stupid. Or, perhaps staggeringly in the tank for the party who has been doing all it can to prevent us from drilling anywhere at all.

The opposition to drilling in ANWR, as exhibied by the WaPo, seems to me an effort to placate the enviro-nazis, but the basis of that argument is similarly flawed, as we’ve demonstrated here so often. There is, in fact, no reason to avoid drilling there, particularly in the limited fashion we’ve been proposing since before Clinton vetoed it ten years back. And remember, too, that the environmental reasons were not the stated ones for the veto; His complaint was it’d take ten years to get the oil flowing, and therefore wasn’t worth it. I wrote at the time that ten years from then, we’d ahve a different view. I was proven right then.

How will we be viewed ten years from now, I wonder?