President Bush and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain have both criticized the Democrat-controlled Senate and Congress for not passing legislation to expand offshore drilling as a reason why Americans are paying upwards of $5 per gallon of gasoline. This is a lie and the politicians know it. They’re playing the American voters for fools in order to get elected. Even oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens agrees!

But one has to ask, given that the Republicans have been the majority party in the House and Senate for much of the past 24 years, and had control of the White House for 16 of those years, if expanding offshore drilling for oil is the solution to our energy crisis as the Republicans now claim, why hadn’t they done it years ago. Ironically, the first President Bush put a moratorium on the expansion of offshore drilling in the first place.

I use the word "expansion" of offshore drilling because the oil industry already has 68 million untapped acres of federal land and offshore leases. Let’s drill those areas before awarding new leases.

There are several reasons why the politicians know expanding offshore drilling will not solve our energy crisis.

First, we don’t have the additional refinery capacity to process more oil into gasoline. There hasn’t been a new refinery built in the United States in decades;

Second, the U.S. has only 3% of the world’s known oil reserves, so pumping more offshore oil now -- or 10 years from now -- will not have an impact on the international supply and market price of oil; and

Third, the U.S. oil industry has 20 years of known oil reserves, as it has for decades. Actually, it wouldn’t make good business sense to identify oil reserves beyond 20 years. So if producing more oil would lower the price at the pump, the oil industry already has the reserves to do so without expanding offshore drilling.

The truth is, the only way out of this devastating energy nightmare is to a) conserve, conserve, conserve, and b) develop alternative sources of energy such as solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, clean coal, and nuclear to their fullest potential.

But instead of investing in these undeveloped, but proven technologies, the federal government subsidizes the production of corn ethanol, which not only uses more energy than the gasoline it replaces, but is driving up the price of corn on the world market to the point where people in poor, underdeveloped countries can no longer afford to buy corn for food. Talk about a bankrupt energy policy!

This problem goes back to the mid 1970s during the first Arab oil embargo which makes me wonder why the politicians of both parties, who are now grandstanding during this presidential election year, haven’t done something about this for the past 35-plus years! One has to wonder, "Where are the leaders?"