Quote Originally Posted by kamper_ View Post
Use it or Loose it!
10,000 permits have been issued to the oil companies and they are not drilling or exploring on this ground. Why not? If they were to drill and find out and bring it to market now it would lower the price of oil and they would loose money.

So Congress is telling them to use these oil leases or risk loosing them forever to someone else who will go and explore some 60 million acres of ground that could have oil. So yes drill now in these areas but stay out of ANWAR.

The Dems are not responsible for Big Oil not doing the drilling they could easily do today. The decision to not drill is coming from Big Oil not the Congress.

I could go on for hours about this. I'll leave with this... DRILL NOW.
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The oil companies want to drill ANWAR and off the coast but they are not drilling in those leased areas. What that says is that the leased areas don't hold the big reserves and would be costly to drill. Given that, if they do drill in the leased land, it just means higher cost per barrel. Right now they are just taking a small fixed percent off each barrel from OPEC imports for the bulk of our oil. Don't you think that if it was cost effective that they would want to drill domestically and themselves keep the base revenue that OPEC gets per barrel? It's a business in a capitalistic environment. They'll pursue what ever generates the most revenue for their shareholders. That's just business. If we want them to drill and provide oil in order to lower the price, we need to let them do it in the areas were they can extract large amounts of oil cheaply.
Frankly, I don't care about ANWAR. I don't know anyone that has been there and I don't know anyone that plans to visit. As I told McCain in a letter, if you want to worry about the environment for me, worry about the one that I live and play in, not some lousy caribou in a frozen tundra area. Athough, I do hear that they taste like chicken.