Our oil. It's our oil. It's all our oil. All over the planet, if it's oil, it belongs to the United States. Right?
We Americans seem to have fixated on drilling for oil under the North American Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). Never mind the expense. Never mind the as-yet-unbuilt infrastructure necessary to suck oil from under vast wads of water and getting it to the main continent. Never mind the minor time delay (decades) before we would get gasoline from that oil. And of course, never mind the simple fact that we seem to be trying to make the oil problem go away by finding more of a finite resource than by building transportation modes that don't use oil at all.
To whom does the oil under the North American Outer Continental Shelf really belong? Who said so? What laws make it ours? What geology makes it ours?
I asked a conservative friend of mine: who died and gave us all the planet's oil? He said that it's our oil under the OCS, but in his next sentence, he said that we have as much right to it as anyone. Um... OK. He said that the Cubans are already there. He was serious. It reminded me of that old joke: What's our oil doing under their sand? What are the Cubans doing over our oil?
I'm no expert on either the geography or the laws governing the high seas, let alone the geography or laws governing continental shelves. I looked it up on Wikipedia and I don't think I understood any of the words in the article other than words like "the." Once upon a time, a country's territory extended 3 miles from land. Then it was 12 miles. Then it stretched out to 200 miles. Nowadays, the laws have so many sub-definitions and exceptions that I suspect we could claim Antarctica as US territory if we thought we could slurp oil up from under it.
When Iraq accidentally forgot to be so grateful to us that they wanted to give us all of their oil, we got worried. When gasoline prices shot through the roof, we got even more worried, and started thinking of ways to get more oil. We didn't think of ways to build non-gas-using cars, but by gosh and by golly, we started dredging up old ways to wreck the environment to get more of what we think is ours. We've gone back to thinking that if we get more oil, we can put off genuinely doing something about the problem.
Somehow, conservatives seem to think that all of the earth's oil is their personal oil. They have forgotten that even if we claim it, extract it, and refine it, it's not our personal oil. It's Exxon's oil, and Shell's oil, and perhaps it's BP's oil, and they'll sell it to China if the Chinese will pay more for it than we will.
If we're going to spend trillions of dollars in Iraq, and billions building the infrastructure needed to drill for oil anywhere we think we can grab it, why not combine those things? We could build a really, really, really long underground and underwater tube to Iraq, swipe their oil (it was supposed to be ours anyway, right?), and use it for the purpose we think god gave it to us for: powering SUVs and pickup trucks in cities (side note: some rural folks and farmers really do need those huge vehicles to transport feed, seed, and livestock). One can buy telescoping forks for swiping one's dining partner's food - why not build a gigantic telescoping tube to swipe our planetary neighbors' oil? We could retract it if anyone is looking and re-extend it at night when nobody's peeking.
Or we could invade other countries. Or we could drill in international waters and have a bunch of lawyers working to prove that it's really our waters. Or we could work on solar powered vehicles. Nah. Too sensible.