Quote:
Originally Posted by SFL Cat
Let me rephrase, Independence from foreign supply, or at least supply from sources not necessarily friendly to our interests.
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you obviously missed my rants on this in the election threads during the debates.
offshore domestic oil drilling would not provide a drop of oil that would find its way into american gas tanks within something like 10 years. the problem is that we don't have the rigs and drilling supplies to exploit offshore oil fields at the moment, and producing and deploying them then doing the drilling and refining would take that long.
now it IS true, and i do admit, that there is oil in ANWR that we could access sooner than that. I will also admit that I am not up to speed on exactly how much oil is up there and what type of effect it would have on gas prices in the short/intermediate term, but my impression has been that it's not massively significant (although let me state again, i don't know, so feel free to post objective scientific research proving me wrong). I believe i've heard scientists say it would be a drop-in-the-bucket compared to what we currently use, and certainly not a long-term answer.
the solution to energy independence is not drilling (either offshore or ANWR). It lies principally in the domestic (and later military) use of alternative energy sources.