Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger belittled the notion that expanded production of offshore oil is an answer to skyrocketing gasoline prices. He criticized the call for aggressive drilling as “blowing smoke.” If offshore production cannot happen soon, he suggests, we ought not to drill at all.

This he said while hop-scotching the country extolling his Global Warming Solutions Act. This new law commits California to eliminating greenhouse gas emissions—but not until 2050, and at an estimated cost of $100 billion to $511 billion.

Yes, it will take time for oil companies to start producing offshore and elsewhere. They have to conduct geophysical surveys, consult well logs, drill test holes and deploy drilling platforms and related technology. But unlike Arnold’s loony Global Warming Solutions Act, it will not take anywhere close to 42 years to bring new oil into the stream of commerce.

Moreover, oil production will meet California’s energy needs – and the nation’s – a lot quicker than Arnold’s pet energy technologies, wind and solar, which today account for less than one percent of U.S. net electricity generation. Arnold promises that renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, will comprise a third of California’s energy portfolio by 2020. That’s 12 years—more than enough time to produce offshore oil.

A Time to Drill
Just the realization that the U.S. is finally willing to tap petroleum offshore, on federal lands, and from Rocky Mountain shale, could impact the psychology of the world petroleum market and immediately dampen gasoline prices.

Arnold would rather have California embark on a quixotic campaign to staunch greenhouse gases. Born in 1947, he wants to start right away, even though the campaign won’t end until he is 103 years old. Still, he dismisses offshore drilling because it could take several years to carry out.

We have come to expect this kind of sloppy thinking from liberals but not from someone who ran for governor as a Reagan conservative. Arnold is plainly no conservative. He is Gray Davis with muscles and a German accent.

Initiative Blackout
Is there still time for him to salvage any kind of legacy from his disastrous energy policies? Perhaps.

First, he should stop taking policy advice from his in-laws and their hangers-on. The Kennedy family is more interested in working with Venezuelan petroleum bully Hugo Chavez than in achieving energy solutions.

Secondly, he needs to face facts. California may be the eighth largest economy in the world – as he often points out – but that won’t last for long. Virtually all of our commerce and manufacturing requires affordable and reliable energy. Because of the renewable energy portfolio standards he championed, state electrical rates are among the highest in the nation, nearly twice the national average. Energy-intensive industries are escaping California for states with wiser energy policies.

Californians have come to expect brownouts and rolling summer blackouts. The latter are intentionally-created electrical power outages necessitated by insufficient generating resources to meet the demand for electricity. The California Energy Commission refers to them euphemistically as “involuntary load curtailments.”

Blackouts threaten statewide because California has not permitted construction of a large power plant in years. State law actually prohibits development of nuclear energy plants. When Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station opened in 1975 some 25 miles southeast of downtown Sacramento, it could produce 900 megawatts of clean energy, enough to power nearly a million area homes. But liberal activists shut down Rancho Seco and turned it into a solar power plant that now supplies a paltry four megawatts of electricity for local ratepayers.

Spark the Change
Where energy is concerned, California is the most regulated state in the union. And it shows. If overregulation of the electrical sector were not enough, California has refused to allow development of new refineries, increased controls on tailpipe emissions and shut down leasing for tidelands oil and natural gas. Last spring, state regulators quashed a proposal to develop a liquefied natural gas terminal 14 miles off Malibu.

This summer, sweltering weather and increased cooling demand will again expose California’s energy shortfall. Yet Arnold seems to have learned nothing.

He learned nothing from Pete Wilson’s foolhardy opposition to offshore drilling. And he learned nothing from the energy emergency Gray Davis declared on Jan. 17, 2001, when the state suffered rolling blackouts for two days and was forced to buy out-of-state power at lavish rates on the open market, resulting in long-term debt obligations Arnold is still trying to wiggle out of.
Governor, open your eyes.