McCain To Call For A Lift On Drilling Ban

Presumptive Republican Nominee Senator John McCain and Florida Governor Charlie Crist campaigning together. Crist, an opponent of Offshore drilling and an early McCain supporter, represents a state where talk of projected drilling offshore would occur if a ban was lifted.

"The United States, according the US Energy Information Agency, as of 2006, was producing 8,330,460 barrels a day, whereas consumption reached 20,687,410 barrels. That compared to a production rate of 10,738,608 barrels a day in 1981, the year the federal moratorium went into place, and a consumption rate of 16,058,000 barrels a day"

By Citizen Correspondent Wyatt McIntyre

Date Posted: 06/17/08

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A new national energy strategy… let the states decide. Word is coming that Arizona Senator and Presumptive Republican Nominee John McCain will announce a new policy regarding the moratorium on offshore drilling. At the heart of this policy, a move that would essentially lift the Federal Government’s control over offshore oil and allow for the individual states to make their own decision with regards to whether they will allow for drilling to occur with potential benefits to states that allowed new drilling permits. This as a part of a new series of discussions he intends to have over the coming weeks over energy security and the need to reduce American dependency on foreign oil.

A product of the 1969 oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California where a Union Oil Offshore drilling platform cracked the ocean floor, leaking an estimated 3 million gallons of oil into the ocean, a disaster that would cause a devastating effect on the natural ecosystem and close the harbor, California would be the first state to move on a ban, restricting offshore drilling for 16 years.

The Federal government would follow 12 years later with the 1981 Outer Continental Shelf Protection Congressional Moratorium, a vote that would have to be renewed and reviewed yearly by the legislative branch. Nine years later, in 1990, then President George H.W. Bush would offer his own push, signing into law a Presidential Moratorium on Off Shore Drilling for 12 years, an act that would subsequently be renewed by his successor President Bill Clinton in 1998, extending the ban until 2012.

Since then, with two exceptions, Louisiana and Texas, which have relied heavily on their offshore capabilities, the national moratorium has remained in place. With that the debate over offshore drilling has continued to rage on, crossing party lines and finding people opposed and in favor of it in many different states, even in the same party. Now, with the rising cost of oil, people demanding some sort of relief, the cries for reducing foreign dependency on oil, and most alternative sources of fuel either too costly, too unreliable, having a potentially adverse effect on the food supply or being years away from being mastered the debate continues.

Now, with a strategy aimed at alleviating that stress on the current economic stress, Senator McCain is taking on a new angle of the discussion.

None of that is to say that Senator McCain is ending his calls for conservation.