Hindsight is 20/20

The soaring gas prices are a heavy burden on all Americans. Everyone wants gas prices to come down to affordable levels. The question is: How do we accomplish this? New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer believes that Saudi Arabia should increase its oil production by one million barrels per day. By the laws of supply and demand, the increased supply of oil would decrease the current price of gas. However, what incentive does Saudi Arabia have in doing this? Well, according to Schumer, the US should block all arms sales to the kingdom until it does as he wants.

However, Chuck Schumer, doesn’t seem to remember that Saudi Arabia is currently a US ally – and its kingdom is also currently in the hands of moderate Muslims. By no longer receiving US weapons, Saudi Arabia might be hard pressed to protect itself against the Muslim extremists. So not only do we risk losing our most powerful ally in the Middle East, but we’d also risk a complete takeover by Wahhabi fundamentalists, in which Saudi Arabia would become the new safe haven for Islamic terrorists.

As stated in the commentary “Will: What is oil really worth to us?” by George F. Wills of the Washington Post, 97 senators, including Schumer, “recently voted to increase the supply of oil on the market by stopping the flow of oil into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which protects against major physical interruptions. Seventy-one of the 97 senators who voted to stop filling the SPR also oppose drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” Despite that drilling would be confined to an area about one-sixth the size of Washington’s Dulles Airport, ANWR’s currently estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil is being kept off the market.

The issue with oil is one that will plague society until a substitute for oil can be found. Stopping the flow of oil into the SPR lacks foresight. The SPR is there to protect Americans for a short period of time in case of disaster or major shortages of oil in the future. There is a limited supply of oil, and already the world is feeling those effects. In the long-term, it’s important to continue reserving oil, as well as, allocating our resources into finding other sources of fuel and energy, so that one day we will no longer be dependent on a scarce resource.

Schumer, and those who vote with him, have no right to complain about rising gas prices, not when there are steps that can be taken closer to home to meet our short-term needs. While it’s important to protect the ANWR, oil is also currently a necessity. Current technologies are so advanced that no harm would come to the Refuge except in that small drilling area, and even that would be minute. However, the ANWR is not our only source of national oil. We also have potential drilling areas in our off-shore territories. Eighty five percent of those territories are currently off-limits to drilling as well, despite containing an estimated 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas – “10 times the oil and 20 times the natural gas Americans use in year.”

As George F. Wills put so beautifully: “America says to foreign producers: We prefer not to pump our oil, so please pump more of yours, thereby lowering its value, for our benefit. Let it not be said that America has no energy policy.”