Obama treads water offshore

Ambivalence is a trait rarely displayed in the political repertoire of President Barack Obama, a man whose views tend toward a level of absolutism disdained by people of his ideological kind, unless, of course, it behooves them. On the subject of offshore drilling, Obama lacks his usual self-assurance, which verges on being a good thing but not quite.

Last summer, in the heat of a campaign that threatened to turn into a contest with soaring gas prices providing fuel for the opposition, Obama, a candidate green in many senses of the term, haltingly backed the otherwise sensible but philosophically repugnant notion of expanded offshore drilling. This coincided with Democrats backing away from long-held advocacy of offshore drilling bans, though only in the form of a farce. They proposed allowing drilling but not within 50 miles of shore, the place where energy companies say much of the oil is.

Ire over gas prices has abated as the cost of oil has plummeted, leaving Obama with a quandary: should he renew his opposition to offshore drilling, appeasing environmentalists in his base and his own aversion to energy that works, or consider the abiding necessity of reducing oil imports by way of increasing domestic production. Obama has shown in his young presidency a predilection for pursuing big plays rather than punting but so far has chosen the latter on drilling.

Last month, Obama shelved a Bush plan to allow drilling off both coasts. But after initially balking, Obama decided this week to allow the Department of the Interior to auction off offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico. So where precisely does the president stand? At the junction of rocks and hard places, tugging at one end of logic while pulling on the other.

His dilemma is engendered by notions that stretch beyond mere falsehood into the realm of fantasy. Obama wants to cultivate alternative energy sources, which is a worthwhile thing if one recognizes the inherent limits. No evidence yet exists that renewables can be counted upon to supplant conventional energy sources.

Obama’s backers and so Obama himself regard oil foreign and domestic as an enemy and so the president hopes to reduce Americans’ use of the stuff. But such thinking evinces a particular naïvete on the subject. Oil flows through the country’s economy like blood through the body, coursing through virtually every industry. Crude is not only wanted, but needed.

And America has it, 86 billion barrels in undiscovered reserves and 18 billion more off the costs where drilling long had been prohibited. Oil companies say the latter figure likely would go higher once exploration began.

Rather than allow pursuit of these vast untapped reservoirs of domestic crude, Obama plans to impose higher taxes on oil companies and strip away tax credits. This follows a pattern in Obama’s grand energy scheme. He plans to wean the country off coal, of which America has plenty, and nudge consumption toward natural gas, the supply of which is limited, through a cap-and-trade policy that will penalize companies for exceeding carbon emissions standards. In all cases, costs will be passed on to consumers. In Obama’s sights is the global warming bogeyman, the existence of which declining temperatures persist in denying.

At least with regard to oil, Americans interested in lower prices driven by higher domestic production can hope for further wavering on the part of the messiah in chief. More likely, the new administration will continue to usurp sensibility with a denseness that thickens while the country stumbles in the iron grip of foreign oil dependence and the irrationality of those who refuse to allow America to break the bonds.