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.
