The cur­rent debate about whether or not to allow off­shore drilling misses some cru­cial facts.

We have no guar­an­tee they’re going to drill at all. It’s in the best inter­ests of the oil com­pa­nies to keep demand high and sup­ply low in order to max­i­mize their (record) prof­its. The oil com­pa­nies are sit­ting on mil­lions of acres of land already that they have leases to but refuse to drill. It’s in their best inter­est to keep that oil in the ground for as long as possible.

Amer­i­can oil com­pa­nies have nearly dou­bled their exports in the last year. So even if Exxon­Mo­bil gets to drill in the Gulf of Mex­ico, that doesn’t mean increased sup­ply (and thus lower prices) for Amer­i­can con­sumers. Exxon­Mo­bil can and prob­a­bly will sell that oil to China or India.

Even if they drill, and even if they sell it to us, we won’t see it for at least seven years. This infor­ma­tion comes straight from Bush’s own energy pol­icy experts. It takes a long time to set up the infra­struc­ture nec­es­sary for indus­trial oil extrac­tion, trans­porta­tion and pro­cess­ing. So even if every­thing goes our (the Amer­i­can con­sumers) way, we still won’t see a drop of this until 2015.

Basi­cally, off­shore drilling is a dis­trac­tion. It has noth­ing to do with our cur­rent energy cri­sis, won’t help Amer­i­can con­sumers in any mean­ing­ful way and essen­tially amounts to lit­tle more than a land grab by the oil com­pa­nies. It’s a handy stick the Repub­li­cans think they can use to beat up democ­rats with an under­in­formed Amer­i­can populace.

Whether it works or not is up to you.