By Chennery Fife

After reading “The drilling bill that bans drilling” at boston.com today, I got to thinking about this issue for the first time in a while. We don’t think about it much here on Penn’s campus, where very few people have a car. But the truth is, this country wants more oil, lower gas prices, and more drilling.

But the reality of one solution, offshore drilling, is more complicated than anyone admits. First, it would take years to start the process of dividing and auctioning off the specific areas for drilling, assuming that it is ours to give away and does not belong to say, Canada, Russia or Mexico. It takes years after that to figure out where exactly to start looking for the oil, and how to extract it. Yes, it is true that no current technology exists to get the oil out from under the bottom of the ocean. And if, by some chance, we find where and how to start drilling, no one knows how much they will find or if it will be a profitable investment. Overall, it does not seem smart to start this process for and unknown outcome.

People in Washington, Democrats and Republicans, all know this. Yet, the only arguments people hear are that Republicans want to drill and the Democrats don’t (because of their crazy, liberal, tree-hugging environmentalist constituency). The Republicans know that if a bill passed to open up offshore drilling, nothing would happen to help this energy crisis or subsequent ones for a least a decade, if it helped at all. The Republicans also know that Democrats would never allow a bill that could jeopardize our environment or hinder ecological responsibility. (People must be motivated to conserve energy; high gas prices ensure this.) Therefore, Republicans look like the good guys to the American public, championing for action that probably would not help us anyways. But the American public chooses not to acknowledge the complexity of this “solution,” and still believe the Republicans are out to help us tame those out-of-control gas prices.