Offshore & Off Topic

Offshore Drilling Rig, Minerals and Management Services, US Dpt of Interior.  

With the devastation from Gustav and Ike, newspapers can’t stop talking about fuel and energy. But the media’s conversations aren’t putting the right questions out to the public. The physical extraction of nonrenewable resources require a geological/environmental perspective, but the talk almost always buzzes around politics and prices.  As a result, a majority of Americans support offshore drilling even though geologists say it’s a terribly unsustainable and economically unviable

resource.

In early summer, the media wrote of offshore drilling in terms of John McCain as the maverick pushing to end our dependence on foreign oil.

By September, media outlets (NPR, Huff Post) repeated the political shout, “Drill Baby, DRILL!” accrediting Republican representatives as the issue’s frontrunners.  

Search for “Offshore Drilling” on the NYTIMES.com and a huge list of McCain/Obama articles appear….No articles on the first search frames the issue from a factual, scientific approach.

But some outlets are getting a word in from experts.  Here’s a look at () one a blog post that drills deeper than politics and into the statistics/facts about oil shale (If politicians had a better understanding of oil shale extraction, they probably wouldn’t hunt for it).  Dr. Bill Chameides suggests here that news papers are also producing exaggerated figures for the billions of oil barrels that could potentially lie underneath our shore. 

This oil obsession could shift America’s future economy, environment, and foreign policy.  It’s an issue that needs broader perspectives from experts, but with the way the media reports offshore drilling, we only learn that politicians operate on two speeds: walk and drill.