Bush calls for lifting of ban on Alaska oil drilling

Like most right wingers, he is utterly relentless. George Bush was part of the group which thought lower petrol prices would be the inevitable result of the Iraq war. This has proven to be utterly false. So what does Georgie propose now? Oh, he's gone back to drilling off Florida's coast and tearing up the Alaskan wilderness in a wild search for multinational companies increased profits... I beg your pardon, for oil.

You've got to give him ten out of ten for consistency at least.

George Bush, responding to public alarm over soaring petrol prices, yesterday proposed overturning decades-old bans on drilling for oil off the US coast and in the pristine Alaskan wilderness. "There's no excuse for delay," the president told a White House press conference. America was too dependent on countries abroad, many of them in unstable regions.

"Congress must face a hard reality: unless members are willing to accept gas prices at today's painful levels, or even higher, our nation must produce more oil. And we must start now," he said.

So, today's high prices are the fault of Congress for failing to drill in Florida and Alaska. It's those damn liberals again with their pesky environmental concerns.

America's reliance on oil from unstable Middle East dictatorships could be replaced by oil from it's own shores, couldn't it?

Expanding oil extraction off the coast would provide 18bn barrels, enough to supply the US for more than two years.

Two years? It's hardly a long term plan is it?

Thankfully, Bush can shout all he wants about drilling in Alaska and off the Floridian coast, as there is almost no chance that Congress, which is controlled by the Democrats, will ever give him permission to do so. I suspect Bush also knows this and is merely looking for a way to blame the Democrats for high oil prices.

Speaking to reporters, Bush, who has close family and business links with the oil industry, said: "Families across the country are looking to Washington for a response." He blamed Democratic opposition for the high petrol prices. "I know the Democratic leaders have opposed some of these policies in the past. Now that their opposition has helped drive gas prices to record levels, I ask them to reconsider."

It's simply outrageous to attempt to lay the price for high oil at the door of people who refuse to dig up Alaska, especially as any oil from that source would take at least a decade to hit the market.

The real reason that oil prices have risen are related to the falling value of the dollar and speculators. And, of course, the instability sown in the Middle East by the Iraq war:

The soaring price of oil is clearly related to the Iraq war. The issue is not whether to blame the war for this but simply how much to blame it. It seems unbelievable now to recall that Bush-administration officials before the invasion suggested not only that Iraq’s oil revenues would pay for the war in its entirety—hadn’t we actually turned a tidy profit from the 1991 Gulf War?—but also that war was the best way to ensure low oil prices. In retrospect, the only big winners from the war have been the oil companies, the defense contractors, and al-Qaeda. Before the war, the oil markets anticipated that the then price range of $20 to $25 a barrel would continue for the next three years or so. Market players expected to see more demand from China and India, sure, but they also anticipated that this greater demand would be met mostly by increased production in the Middle East. The war upset that calculation, not so much by curtailing oil production in Iraq, which it did, but rather by heightening the sense of insecurity everywhere in the region, suppressing future investment.

Nor was this unpredicted:

“A war against Iraq could cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, play havoc with an already depressed domestic economy and tip the world into recession because of the adverse effect on oil prices, inflation and interest rates, an academic study [by William Nordhaus, Sterling professor of economics at Yale University] has warned.” [Independent, 11/16/02]

So Bush has a lot of nerve to attempt to blame oil prices on the fact that Democrats won't allow him to rip up Alaska and the US coastline. The simple truth is that everything Bush and the Republicans promised before the Iraq war has proven to be false, and many of the dire predictions of their opponents have proven to be true.

We were promised a war which would pay for itself:

"Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enormous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt that they will."

Richard Perle, chair
The Pentagon's Defense Policy Board
July 11, 2002

"It is unimaginable that the United States would have to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars and highly unlikely that we would have to contribute even tens of billions of dollars."

Kenneth Pollack
former director for Persian Gulf affairs
National Security Council
September 2002

"There is a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be US taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people. We are talking about a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon."

Paul Wolfowitz
Deputy Secretary of Defense
testifying before the defense subcommittee
of the House Appropriations Committee
March 27, 2003

They were wrong. And Bush is taking chutzpah to a new level when he attempts to blame Democrats and their unwillingness to tear up areas of natural beauty for the fact that oil prices have soared rather than fallen since his Iraqi misadventure.

No-one is claiming that the Iraq war alone is responsible for soaring oil prices, but the simple fact is that the cheap oil we were promised has simply not materialised.

And, since the US invaded the country sitting on top of the world’s second largest proven oil reserves, the price has soared. Only a moron would see no correlation between that and rising oil prices. But it takes a special kind of fool to think the answer to the problem lies in the Alaskan wilderness or off the Florida coast.

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Tags: Bush, oil prices, Florida, Alaska, Iraq war, recession