Drilling Off the New Jersey Coast

NIMBY: Not in my back yard. For decades, this has been the mantra of those who have successfully sought to prevent drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. Well, that’s just changed. Democrat leadership in both the House and Senate dropped their support for keeping a moratorium on Atlantic and Pacific coastal drilling in effect. The next president, whoever he is, needs to make sure it stays that way.

It’s about time. For too long, we have relied on oil from unstable nations in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela to our south, and Russia, not only to keep us supplied, but to keep all the potentially nasty problems of oil production far away from us, elsewhere in the world. We nervously watch oil prices shoot up every time that a potentially major hurricane threatens to temporarily halt drilling in the western Gulf of Mexico and to shut down refineries along the Texas coastline and bordering states.

The Canadian government has already announced that it will begin exploring for oil on the continental shelf of the Grand Banks. We could do the same on our section of the Grand Banks, in the Gulf of Maine, and off the New Jersey coast. But oh no: NIMBY.

Too many vain and unrealistic politicians want the oil spigots to remain wide open, but don’t want oil rigs nearby. I say baloney to that. We either stop using as much oil as we do (it won’t happen voluntarily) or we go where the oil is – and, that’s in our own back yard right here in America.