Lame duck surfs oil’s slippery slope

Dear President Bush:

… Even though you are a lame duck living in the ever-growing shadows of Barack O. and John M., I am sure, sir, you are still very busy. Just organizing that press conference Wednesday where you said how you were going to do something about the high price of oil, had to take a lot of your valuable time.

So when you started talking about the need to open up offshore drilling that your dad, bless his skydiving soul, shut down back in 1981, and expanding oil exploration and drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge that former President Bill Clinton, bless his overheated little soul, vetoed back in the mid-1990s, I almost jumped up and cheered.

Almost.

Just before jumping I recalled reading that the resumption of drilling in coastal waters would not begin to cut prices at the pump until sometime in the late 2020s. I looked it up. It was your own Energy Information task force that made that finding. That same body has said that it would take 10 years for oil pumped from the ANWR to have an impact on the retail price of gas. So these are not what you would call quick fixes.

Connecticut Post