Offshore drilling? Yes.

WASHINGTON - Shaking up years of energy policy and his own environmental backers, President Barack Obama threw open a huge swath of East Coast waters and other protected areas in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico to drilling Wednesday, widening the politically explosive hunt for more homegrown oil and gas.

Obama's move allows drilling from Delaware to central Florida, plus the northern waters of Alaska, and exploration could begin 50 miles off the coast of Virginia by 2012. He also wants Congress to lift a drilling ban in the oil-rich eastern Gulf of Mexico, 125 miles from Florida beaches.

Still off limits: the entire Pacific seaboard. And in a nod to conservation, Obama canceled oil exploration in Alaska's Bristol Bay, deeming the area a national treasure.
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For this oil-dependent nation, the decision could start to reshape far-reaching economic and national security policies, affecting where the U.S. gets the fuel for its cars, heating and energy-gulping industry.

For a president on a roll following a big health care win, Wednesday's drilling declaration was both aggressive and pragmatic. Even with a push for cleaner energy sources and efficient cars ? and with promises of protection for ecosystems and coastal tourism ? the nation still needs more oil, Obama said.

"The answer is not drilling everywhere all the time," Obama said in an event at Andrews Air Force Base. "But the answer is not, also, for us to ignore the fact that we are going to need vital energy sources to maintain our economic growth and our security."

Inside politically conscious Washington, Obama's announcement was viewed, too, as a play to win Republican support for a comprehensive climate change bill. Obama needs GOP help to move legislation through the Senate that would limit carbon emissions, a key priority, and his decision on drilling drew at least a bit of Republican applause.

Republican George W. Bush pushed for years to expand offshore drilling. He and Congress lifted bans on some drilling in 2008, when gasoline prices hit record levels. But Obama's plan is narrower than Bush's, which also would have opened up oil and gas leasing areas off California and in the North Atlantic.

Obama got a predictable pummeling Wednesday from environmentalists, who sarcastically compared him to Sarah Palin, the former vice presidential candidate whose oil-promoting speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008 famously drew chants of "Drill, Baby, Drill!"

Any big changes to environmental policy ? particularly oil drilling ? tend to touch off the bitter debate that Obama says he wants the country to end.


His support for exploratory drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas north of Alaska, for example, drew outrage from the Center for Biological Diversity as a threat to polar bears. "Short of sending Sarah Palin back to Alaska to personally club polar bears to death, the Obama administration could not have come up with a more efficient extinction plan for the polar bear," said Brendan Cummings, the center's senior counsel.

More broadly, the conservation group Oceana declared Obama was "unleashing a wholesale assault on the oceans."

Obama has been a supporter of drilling as part of a broader energy agenda, and the White House played down any talk of wooing Republicans.

Obama calls for new Atlantic, Gulf oil drilling - Oil & energy- msnbc.com

I support him on this. Just as I support them opening up ANWAR. If someone is going to be drilling for oil there it might as well be us.

im with stripes, someone is gonna drill, why not us??

I've never been opposed to it, but some think this is the answer to all of our problems. This will take years and will have a small impact, but it's still a good thing. We did this to ourselves, we decided to use up the rest of the worlds oil, now we're dependent on it. That along with just now realizing how important exploring alternative energy is, say what you want about Carter, but he was dead on when it came to this...then Ronnie comes rolling into town and does away with really all of it.

We should have been doing more of this years ago, and it would have made a huge difference globally. Alternative fuels do need to be explored and improved, but its a long way from them being a viable option as well.

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Originally Posted by 1inStripes

We should have been doing more of this years ago, and it would have made a huge difference globally. Alternative fuels do need to be explored and improved, but its a long way from them being a viable option as well.

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I think what R13's saying here is that if we had started looking into alternative fuels sooner, maybe they'd be a more viable option, or be a whole lot closer. I tend to think he's right.

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Originally Posted by CoeburnCane

I think what R13's saying here is that if we had started looking into alternative fuels sooner, maybe they'd be a more viable option, or be a whole lot closer. I tend to think he's right.

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IDK I think we droped the ball on Nucular energy IMHO that is where we could have(and probably still would) get the most bang for our buck

Of couse I wonder if this new drilling is more of a temptation to try to get 60 votes in the sente for Cap and Trade

i know its not very cost-conscious, but why aren't we exploring more with the windmill power generators or the solar panels?

if we spent as much money on wind or solar power as we did on oil, we may be able to become totally independent of foreign oil.

but my opinion is that some in Washington do NOT want us to explore the alternatives or faze out our oil dependency, because of all the money in big oil.

If we could get the big businesses and corporations out of Washington, we might be able to get some real progress towards leaving foreign oil behind.

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Originally Posted by Counts

IDK I think we droped the ball on Nucular energy IMHO that is where we could have(and probably still would) get the most bang for our buck

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Nuclear energy is only part of the equation to the answer of weening us off foreign oil. Nuclear is incredibly expensive, not with the fuel part which proponents seem to focus on, but building, maintaining and security is serious money. Nuclear, along with others like solar, wind etc. etc. are the answer. Carter made it a priority when he was in office, he seen first hand along with everyone else that lived then, of how dependent we were on foreign oil and what it could do to us. I think I read somewhere that up until Carter took office, we got about 20 percent of our electricity from oil generation, then it went all the way down to 3% after he left. Those tax-cuts for energy efficient houses started under Carter, then the fuel standards that were saving millions of barrels of oil were his product. Then Reagan comes in, guts programs like the Solar Energy Research Institute and cuts budgets for them dramatically(think it was 130 mil, cut down to 30 mil for example for one of them)...that set us back so far, it's insane.

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Originally Posted by CoeburnCane

I think what R13's saying here is that if we had started looking into alternative fuels sooner, maybe they'd be a more viable option, or be a whole lot closer. I tend to think he's right.

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I know what he's saying, I'm just saying right now, because of all the feet dragging we are still a long ways off on alternatives. Remember crude oil isn't developed just for gasoline.