Our View: It's drilling time offshore

President Bush has lifted the executive ban on oil drilling on the outer continental shelf. The public increasingly sees the reasonableness of such a policy change. But no new drilling will occur as long as the Democratic congressional leadership remains opposed. Meanwhile, gasoline prices climb.

Even the pioneer Get Oil Out! (GOO) environmental group that originally opposed offshore drilling after the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and the nonprofit law firm Environmental Defense Center have endorsed drilling from a platform off the California coast, after negotiating concessions that include eventual removal of four offshore oil platforms. There are responsible ways to make this happen.

Public sentiment is shifting. A Rasmussen poll recently found 67 percent of voters favor offshore drilling, and 64 percent believe it would lower gasoline prices. Many environmental claims and demands increasingly are viewed as more hot air than substance, and more costly than beneficial. Still, Congress lags behind the president's reasonable lead and changing public opinion.

It's one thing to ban drilling that threatens to goop-up beaches and fish. But chances of that occurring are infinitesimally small today, thanks to technological improvements. It's entirely another thing to ban drilling because of hand-wringing that the Earth's temperature might increase by an almost imperceptible amount over the next 100 years.

Perhaps that explains growing appreciation of the real-life costs inherent in radically rigid environmental demands. It also doesn't help global warming alarmists' cause that there's been no warming for a decade and none forecast for the next decade.

Alarmists' credibility took another blow in June at the Energy Business Watch Climate and Hurricane Forum in New York when four leading climatologists and meteorologists, each for a different scientific reason, concluded that a global cooling trend is about to begin. If such facts aren't bad enough news for those opposed to drilling, economic reality adds to the shifting momentum.

"Poor people could not give a damn about climate change because they want light 24 hours a day," writes Gal Luft of the Business & Media Institute. "In India alone, 600 million people are not connected even to the [power] grid ... they'll tell you: 'We want electricity, we want it today, we want it cheap, we don't care how you make it.'"

"The public," writes Paul Weyrich, of the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, "has changed from supporters of environmentalism to advocates of drilling for oil and natural gas in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge and/or in the ocean. ... The only topic these days is $4- to $5-per-gallon gasoline."

Growing economies are incompatible with reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, the common consequence of anti-drilling advocates and global warming alarmists' goals. But economists acknowledge the 30 million more Americans expected by 2020 can't be accommodated without generating more emissions from burning fossil fuels to meet their needs.

While the market determines whether there are economically viable alternatives to oil, the reality is we will rely on fossil fuel derivatives for many decades, if not longer. Congress should wake up to these realities and lift its offshore drilling ban.