Pelosi, Dems Hurting the Planet

Sometimes, it is said, people cannot see the forest for the trees, and one might express pity for an environmental movement that fails in that regard. While the metaphor is not quite on target, that essentially describes what Charles Krauthammer has to say about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's environmentalist approach/energy policy, which refuses to acknowledge the current reality that Americans require oil, and that the most environmentally sound approach would be to expand drilling for it here:

The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling. Today, directional drilling -- essentially drilling down, then sideways -- allows access to oil that in 1970 would have required a surface footprint more than three times as large. Additionally, the United States has one of the most extensive and least corrupt regulatory systems on the planet.

Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?

The net environmental effect of Pelosi's no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world -- thereby increasing net planetary damage.