Change the chant

Saturday, Sept. 6, 2008 | 2:11 a.m.

Drill, baby, drill!

Egged on by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, thousands of delegates attending the Republican National Convention gleefully burst into that chant during prime time Wednesday night.

Their chorus was in support of opening more federally owned offshore sites to drilling, even though tens of millions of offshore acres approved for drilling are sitting idle.

Why they are pushing offshore drilling for oil as the predominant answer to the nation’s high energy prices beats us, unless they are simply, unthinkingly, following the politically motivated lead of their standard-bearer, John McCain.

Our heavy dependence on oil — mostly for transportation but also for producing electricity — is what is keeping energy prices high. Unless we as a nation reduce our demand, prices for oil-based products will just keep getting higher.

As oil is bought and sold on a world, not a national, market, only production that significantly raises the global supply of oil would significantly lower prices. The recoverable amount of offshore oil is unknown, but most analysts do not believe it is enough to have much effect on world supply.

The Republican delegates should have been chanting instead about diversifying our energy base by way of a different offshore strategy.

In June the Delaware Legislature approved a large wind farm 12 miles off that state’s shores, a project scheduled to be completed by 2012. Other wind projects proposed for the waters off Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island are in the approval stage.

Wind farms are becoming common on land throughout the country because they have proved to be a clean source of competitively priced energy. So why not go offshore, where the wind is often much stronger?

Environmental concerns about wind have greatly lessened over the past few years as technology has improved. And complaints about windmills’ being unsightly have dropped off considerably as the price of conventional energy has gone up.

Let’s hear a new chant in the offshore debate: Wind, baby, wind!