The light at the end of a very dark tunnel this year for Republicans has been their call to lift the offshore drilling ban. Mired in the most unpopular Presidential administration in modern history and dogged by outright failures of leadership including the Iraq War, the sinking economy, Katrina, Guantanamo etc. etc. prospects for the GOP looked very, very dim this year unless they found some way, somehow to reinvent themselves. As luck would have it, that way turned out to be not much of a stretch at all, as Congressional Republicans took back to their familiar tactic of misleading rather than leading the American public over the need to lift the offshore oil drilling ban currently in place in light of record gas prices.
The facts are the facts, despite the spin and bluster that has been floating around. As noted by Robert Kauffman of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University in a recent interview with National Public Radio, nobody knows how much oil is available in the portions of the continental shelf covered by the drilling ban until they start drilling but the optimistic projections have the number at 19 billion barrels, or slightly over two years worth at present domestic consumption rates. What we do know for certain however is that in the best of all possible worlds - if drilling started today - not a drop of oil would come out of these areas until at least five years and it would take a decade for full production to come online.
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Katie Halper:
Nicole Hughes: 
Andy Kondrat:
Jon Popham: 
Giulia Rozzi:
Gina Telaroli: 
Individual, community and corporate efforts to better the environment are necessary and effective, but solutions for our environmental and energy crises have to come from systematic changes in our political system too. Want to know what’s going on behind the closed doors of those mysterious white buildings? Check out the week in green politics, and see for yourself:
“Big Oil” Man 