Now that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has suspended the permitting process to allow offshore oil and natural gas drilling in portions of the Outer Continental Shelf, some members of Congress are joining with radical environmentalists in calling for a permanent ban. Salazar is right to put the permitting process on hold, pending a credible determination of the cause of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. But the environmental ideologues and their congressional allies are simply trying to use the Gulf tragedy to advance other narrow political and ideological agendas.
For one thing, the incidence of accidents is almost never a logical reason for stopping an activity. Consider the interstate highway system. Between 1994 and 2008, there were 562,712 accidents on the interstates and 627,433 fatalities, according to a Scripps Howard News Service analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System. Incredibly, the deadliest interstate in the country is a 181-mile stretch in San Bernadino County, Calif., of Interstate 15, which links Los Angeles and Las Vegas. During the same period, there were 834 accidents on that road, resulting in 1,069 fatalities. But nobody is proposing closing the interstates, because they are the heart of America’s transportation system, and they are incredibly safe, considering the millions of miles driven on them every day.
The same logic applies on the issue of drilling in the OCS. As Salazar said shortly after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, with the loss of 11 lives, approximately one-third of America’s oil and natural gas comes from drilling in the OCS. Since 2001, there have been only 41 fatalities and 302 injuries in offshore drilling accidents. As for environmental damage from oil spills, Mother Nature seeps 47 million gallons of raw crude into North American waters every year. That compares to less than 1 percent of all oil found in the world’s oceans results from petroleum and natural gas exploration and production. Four times as much is caused by transportation of oil, chiefly by tankers plying the world’s oceans. Stop OCS drilling, and America will need lots more tankers bringing oil here from places like Saudi Arabia. That means an OCS drilling ban would ultimately result in more, not less, oil getting into the oceans.
Most important, the majority of Americans oppose a permanent ban on drilling in the OCS, according to a survey conducted for Investor’s Business Daily after the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Fifty-nine percent of the 795 adults surveyed between April 30 and May 5 approve of “oil exploration and drilling in America’s national territorial waters.” Fortunately, cooler heads have so far prevailed on this issue within the Obama administration.
