Breakfast Discussion: Drilling more oil or pushing for alternatives? [News]

This topic has been hot the last couple of days… Bush, McCain and the Republicans in general want to overturn bans on offshore drilling off most of the waters of the US and open up northern Alaska for drilling while Obama and the Democrats say that such a plan won’t work to ease gas prices and want to invest all that money in research and deployment for alternate energy sources.

On the one hand, more drilling in the US will eventually cause a dip in prices, though experts feel this would be a small and temporary dip and wouldn’t be felt until about 2012, though it may cause a slight plateauing as investors and speculators might hold off for just a tiny bit in raising gas prices 10 cents per day.

On the other hand, the Democrat’s idea is that the money should be invested in things like ethanol production, wind power, solar power and electric / hybrid technology. This would help to permanently end our dependence on not just foreign oil, but oil in general and is seen as a smarter long-term solution. However, experts estimate that we wouldn’t see the effects of such and investment until 2025.

The US currently consumes about 11 million barrels of oil a day and by opening up more drilling, by 2012, we could be pumping 1-2 million barrels a day, which would be something, but we don’t have enough domestic oil and we use too much of it for it to make much of an impact, though it would be something. However, by delaying heavy investment in alternative energy sources, we just delay the inevitable weening off of oil and make it harder in the long run and pump more pollutants into the air and soil.

My opinion is that I wish we could do both– pour millions into new sources of oil for the short term and pour millions more into alternate energy sources for the long term. But splitting the difference only dilutes both and we end up with neither.

Pro-drilling article at RealClarPolitics here.

Pro alternate energy discussion at AlternativeEnergyHQ here.