The Republican oil plan: wait for 2030

UPDATE: follow El Tinklenberg's energy tour today at Liberal in the Land of Conservative.

Regular readers may have noticed that I've been pontificating quite a bit on gas prices and Republican's claims that they can improve prices. I'm going to continue writing about the price of oil, because it's become one of the most important issues of this election and I'm not about to let the Republicans fool Americans into thinking they have a real plan.

Republicans like Michele Bachmann and Norm Coleman are trying to claim that if we just expand oil drilling, we'll see a magical decrease to $2/gal. Unfortunately, not only is this untrue, but drilling won't even have any effect at all.

A 2007 study by the Energy Information Administration -- a part of the Bush administration -- did some forecasts for increased offshore drilling. The agency assumed technically recoverable oil resources would increase by 18 billion barrels -- 15 billion barrels more than Norm "W" Coleman estimates in his offshore-drilling plan. But the EIA finds that it doesn't help:

The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030 (emphasis added)

So why do the Republicans keep thumping their chests over oil prices? Because they believe they've finally found an issue that will win them political points. In fact, they don't want gas prices to go down before the election. In two previous articles, I showed that Michele Bachmann and John Kline and Norm Coleman voted against measures to lower the price of gas, because they want to score political points with their own plans.

I wish we liberals could offer you a quick and easy plan to lower gas prices. Unfortunately, we are intellectually honest. There is no longer an easy fix. Global oil prices will continue rising, and our best option is to switch to alternative energy sources. But because we have relied on oil for so long with absolutely no backup mechanism, it's going to take a while to get ourselves to the point where we can seriously consider alternatives. In the meantime, Democrats like Tim Walz are pursuing common-sense strategies like a middle-class tax cut to help offset the price of gas. But let's not set ourselves back even further by obsessing with oil and continuing to ignore alternative energy sources.

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