Bush Lifting Offshore Drilling Ban

Despite the fact that we cannot drill our way out of our current energy crisis President George W. Bush will this afternoon lift the Executive Order ban on offshore drilling. While no drilling can occur unless Congress lifts its own ban this move by President Bush is still frightening and misguided.

Four dollars a gallon is not an unrealistic, exorbitant, unmanageable price for gasoline. Hell, I pay upwards of $60 a gallon for Vodka. Yes, when we were in high school gas was only $.99 a gallon. But if we abandon that historical perspective and rather objectively assess the price within the scope of our present economy? $4 is not a lot of money for a gallon of a necessary liquid. The problem is that we as a species are engaged in a shift in our infrastructure from cheap energy to expensive energy; so we're needlessly pissing ourselves stupid rather than simply adapting. That lack of adaptation is what infuriates me more than anything else.

Somehow humanity has convinced itself that it exists independent of the world in which it lives, that despite our knowledge of the price of gas, its limited nature, and our inability to drill ourselves out of the problem people still buy SUVs and waste their money on needless extravagances. People are still mowing their lawns with gas-powered mowers. Yet we seem willing to destroy the environment and grasp at straws out of that fundamental desire to maintain normalcy.

That's what I do not understand about this whole situation. We want this unending supply of cheap fuel so that we can maintain our current economic philosophy of buying stupid shit simply because we can. We don't want to grapple with discovering a new source of fuel. We'll just buy a hybrid car and use the money we save on other stupid shit. We're simply remaining complacent with what we have and attempting to whine and bitch our way via drilling, ignorance, and half-assed compromises to a continuation of the way things are.

And it doesn't make sense.

The problem is not the environmental issues, the political issues. The problem is not even the idea that we have to drill our way out of this mess. The real problem, the true dilemma, is that we've managed to entrench ourselves in this happy little fabricated view of normalcy as a house and a car and two kids and a dog that we're so addicted to it, so unwilling to compromise and adapt that we're completely unwilling to accept a change in our situation. We would rather dig in, drill in, and cling to this illusion of perpetual gasoline and our Beaver Cleaver idealized little Ziplock existence rather than change.

That's the wholly bizarre aspect of this whole situation. We're not striving for zero emission automobiles or, hell, even abandoning automobiles for something better. We're not striving to embrace far more rational economic policies and, say, stop buying stupid shit. We're not striving for anything. We're merely wallowing in this normalcy of gasoline addiction and middling cars with adequate gas mileage. Hell, at last week's G8 meeting they agreed to halve emissions by 2050. That's not change, not striving, not grasping or engaging. That's foisting the responsibility off on someone else.

I'm not necessarily hoping for an awakening of the proletariat. I'm not envisioning a future in which we stop wasting money on pets and movies and reach a peak of mutual enlightenment; I don't imagine that we'll embrace the reality of our situation and so establish a harmonious existence with the world in which we live.

I just think it would be keen if people who bitch about the price of gas would stop mowing their lawns with gas mowers; I think it would be awesome if we embraced marginal change and adapted rather than dig in and bitch until the last possible moment. And at the very least if we could stop blatantly, wastefully, wrecking the planet with this gluttonous, slothful lurching through our own moronic, lazy addiction that would be just fucking dandy. Let's at least drill efficiently and rationally, in a loose sense of the word, rather than just open up the Outer Continental Shelf out of a hope that doing so will compell the fuckheads to vote for McCain.


Aside: I've looked at Bush 41's Executive Orders and Clinton's Executive Orders but could not find the Offshore Drilling ones.