Temporary Ban is Better Than Drilling

Hooray! There will be no more drilling for oil off the Atlantic coast waters. At least temporarily. Wouldn’t it be great if this was just the impetus needed to force development of alternative fuels? One can hope, right?

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said BP’s Deepwater Horizon massive oil spill showed that the administration needed "to proceed with caution" on expanding offshore drilling. (This type of disaster is what environmentalists have been warning us of for years.)

Why do we always have to wait for a huge disaster to occur before we listen?

I can believe in technology as much as the next guy but seriously, we have to take into account that humans get lazy and sloppy and the results can lead to disaster.

Of course there are always opponents. And of course they will cite monetary reasons to continue drilling instead of developing alternative plans. I mean come on, how lame is it to claim that the billions of dollars that oil companies would have paid to lease new offshore tracts would actually go to help balance the federal budget. As if that is what that money would be used for.