Recently, President Barack Obama decided to allow offshore drilling off the East Coast, including North Carolina. This appears to be an olive branch to the right, but I’m a bit skeptical. This “compromise” is nothing more than a diversion of attention. Obama rammed health care down our throats even though a majority of Americans disagreed with his proposal. Now he appears willing to compromise on a somewhat less important and, more importantly, less expensive endeavor.

This is nothing more than a political ploy. Obama’s plan allows for more drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and Florida area. It also allows for the seismic exploration and mapping of the waters off the East Coast and in the Atlantic. This will help when deciding whether or not to lease new areas to the oil companies to drill. But the plan does not open up much more land for actual drilling. In fact, this closes the areas that were originally in the Bush administration’s plan. In Bush’s plan, drilling was allowed in all of the area covered in the Obama plan, as well as Bristol Bay in Alaska and areas off the West Coast in California, Oregon and Washington. Obama’s plan sounds like a political decision because it is too coincidental that major geographic areas that voted for Obama, which are staunchly liberal, are exempted from offshore drilling?

We need to completely expand our offshore drilling to allow drilling in all waters. After all, the environmental impact is not as much of a factor as many on the left would like you to believe. Very few leaks occur from offshore drilling platforms, because oil leaks have a very miniscule chance of happening. An Exxon Valdez-like disaster with today’s technological advancements on the offshore drilling platforms is almost impossible.

Additionally, our dependence on foreign oil allows oil cartels such as OPEC to dictate the price of oil and our supply. These countries are not friends of the United States, and some of them support terrorism. So we, by buying oil from these cartels, are in fact supporting nations that support terrorism. I am not advocating a drill-everything plan. I agree that we need to look at alternatives to oil for the future and utilize more renewable sources of energy at the present. Drilling can give us the extra time we need until the technology advances and we have our alternative source of fuel. Drilling gives us that extra time; we need it right now, so why not open up the drilling everywhere?

By choosing where to drill based on geopolitical regions, Obama is not creating a true appeasement of the right, as he would like you to believe. Why would the president deem the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington off-limits due to environmental damage potential and then turn around and determine that it’s fine on the East Coast? He is trying to divert the American people’s attention away from the health care bill with a half-hearted attempt at bipartisanship, hidden behind the veil of Washington-as-usual politics. And with Obama’s Washington-as-usual politics, I ask, what happened to that promise and slogan Obama ran on in 2008, “Change We Can Believe In?”