Despite his past votes in the U.S.Senate against oil drilling in ANWR, John McCain has a great opportunity to break open the presidential campaign in his favor.
He simply needs to admit he was wrong about ANWR--that it made sense when oil was $30-$40 a barrel, but at $140 a barrel we are facing a serious supply crisis, and we can no longer afford the luxury of not drilling in ANWR. After all, we only need to drill on less than 2,500 acres of the 3 million acres in ANWR, anyway.
New technology has made drilling much less environmentally unacceptable in sensitive areas, and the only answer to bringing down gasoline prices is more supply. This will play just about right in McCain's favor, as the easterners will have just started buying heating oil at vastly higher prices in the fall, just a head of the presidential election.
McCain has already backtracked on offshore oil drilling, saying he's in favor if the affected states allow it. The current economic crisis caused by high oil prices is the perfect cover for changing his position. Emergency situations require emergency action to deal with them.
He comes across looking like a statesman, not a flipflopper. He leaves Obama high and dry, who has put in with the environmentalist crowd and said we can only deal with the situation through conservation and alternative energy, like wind, solar and geothermal
He agrees with them that the earth doesn't have enough remaining supplies of oil to solve the problem by drilling. Besides, he says, it will take 10 years if we started today, for it to make a difference. What if Bill Clinton hadn't vetoed ANWR drilling 10 years ago, and it was just coming on line now? We need to get started.
This has increasingly been shown to be patently false. Counting oil shale and the tar sands in Canada, North America has more oil reserves than the Middle East, and with full scale development, we can become the Saudi Arabia of oil. The Saudis, for one, believe that, and are afraid of it, telling the recent world conference that they would ramp up oil production from 10 million barrels a day to 15 million.
The oil shieks themselves can see the day coming when their dominance will erode. John McCain can take advantage of that, and should do so pronto.
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