Obama's Offshore Oil Drilling Plan Riles Coastal Residents

At Fox News, "Cost of Offshore Oil Drilling":

Plus, letters to the editor, at NYT (where none of the authors favor "drill baby, drill"), "Obama’s Plan for Offshore Drilling"

To the Editor:

Just as he did with health care reform for the better part of last year, President Obama is now courting Congressional Republicans with his new energy proposals. This, too, is likely to be a futile exercise, especially when Republicans have vowed not to cooperate with anything that Democrats propose.

But far more important than the political capital and time wasted, the president’s proposals are a Faustian bargain. They call for more nuclear power when there is still no good plan for what to do with the long-lived, lethal radioactive wastes. They call for more offshore drilling when we should be burning less, not more, oil; when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita demonstrated so clearly the risks to offshore oil rigs; and when coastal marine ecosystems are already under such severe threat. They call for “clean coal” when anyone who has looked seriously at the environmental and public health disaster of mountaintop coal mining knows there is no such thing.

We must applaud the president’s small-scale initiatives for renewable energy generation — solar, wind, some forms of biomass, and geothermal — and for promoting energy efficiency and mass transit. These are the real healthy, sustainable, job-creating solutions to our climate and energy crises that we must expand exponentially, starting now. China is doing so, and is rapidly cornering the world market. Why aren’t we?

Eric Chivian

Boston, March 31, 2010

That's Philippe Cousteau at the interview. He's founder of EarthEcho International, and environmental lobbying group. He looks like a nice guy, although I'd need to do longer search to see if he's got radical ties. He's hangin' with some key Dems at the link, so what can you do?