Posted on 08/26/2008 5:57:25 AM PDT by bestintxas
Nearly 40 years after a disastrous oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., galvanized the nation and gave birth to the modern environmental movement, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors is poised to vote today in support of offshore drilling. Proponents of the measure contend that the United States cannot turn away from a homegrown energy source at a time when the country is dangerously dependent on foreign oil and technology has made offshore drilling safer than ever. Opponents, however, deride today's vote to ask Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to change state policy and "allow expanded oil exploration and extraction in the Santa Barbara County region" as an exercise in polls, politics and posturing. The vote is largely symbolic — the supervisors have no power to approve new offshore drilling, and the governor has come out against it. But it underscores both the issue's volatility and this coastal county's changing reality. With gasoline prices hovering around $4 a gallon and a presidential election in the offing, even U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and presumptive Democratic candidate Barack Obama in recent weeks cautiously have embraced the possibility of offshore drilling. But today's vote is as much about the tension between the inland and the coast as it is about the price of a barrel of crude. Population and political power have been shifting away from the more liberal coast, and the board has a conservative, pro-industry majority for the first time in about a decade. The result: an expected 3-2 vote to support increased oil drilling off the same beaches that were coated in crude and covered with the corpses of birds and dolphins after 3 million gallons of oil leaked from an offshore drilling site in 1969.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
What they CAN do, is drill a little deeper, into the magma layer just below the fractures in the crust fault that runs past them in the sea, and use this heat source to generate HUGE amounts of geothermal-driven electrical generators. Just inject the sea water into the white-hot magma, and use the superheated steam to power up generator turbines.
Or you could just use the oil. Like they do in Norway. Produce so much, we could export it.
“Opponents, however, deride today’s vote”
Like they deride everything else connected to oil. “It’ll take ten years, no, TWENTY years for new oil to be available.” If they have their way, it will be never.
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