Oiled up

If a Republican were president, the Democrats would have leaped like a pack of hungry jackals at the chance to exploit the huge Gulf of Mexico oil spill for political gain. We can just hear the outraged demands that the president reverse his decision to expand offshore drilling because this one leak proves that no drilling so close to shore is safe.

This president, though, is a Democrat, and so party leaders have shut off the outrage valve. Only radical environmentalists are using this leak to attack President Barack Obama for his decision in late March to allow more drilling off the coast of the United States.

The White House initially indicated that it had no intention of reversing the drilling decision. Then a senior adviser said, well, we’ll have to see how this leak happened. The first response was the right one.

Despite this awful leak, offshore drilling is statistically extremely safe. The Energy Information Administration maintains that offshore drilling has a stellar safety record, spilling only a fraction of one percent of all extracted oil since 1975.

A joint study by NASA and the Smithsonian Institution several years ago found that offshore drilling is a smaller source of oceanic oil contamination than tanker accidents or nature herself.

Obama should have opened more areas to drilling than he did. Because he bowed to environmentalists in severely limiting where he would allow new drilling, he might again in the face of renewed demands that the oil stay underground forever. He shouldn’t.

— The New Hampshire Union Leader, Manchester, N.H.