Why we shouldn't open our coasts to drilling

This is another e-mail trying to explain to my grandma why drilling offshore is a bad idea.

"The cost/benefit scenario of opening up our waterways to drilling is a no brainer. This is actually a simple answer. In my opinion, global warming doesn’t even fit in here. We are causing global warming by using gas and oil – it doesn’t matter where that oil comes from. The reason people want to open the waterways is so that we can get more of our oil locally rather than from unfriendly foreign nations, not because they don’t believe in global warming.

The real threat that offshore drilling poses to us is oil spills and lost revenue. While they are not widely publicized anymore, oil spills still happen fairly regularly. The most recent example was only a few months ago in the Mississippi river – oil ended up covering miles and miles of the Mississippi river and closed down the port of New Orleans, costing the US economy $215 million a day. Then just over 6 months ago there was the spill right here in San Francisco . I actually saw the devastation from that one first-hand.

It goes without saying that these things are horrible for animal species. Thousands of birds died in the San Francisco spill, not to mention the fish and other local mammals. . Plus, the sonar used to detect oil and drill causes whales brains to explode Literally. I am not kidding. These sonar waves cause whales to go insane and beach themselves. All of these are reasons why we shouldn’t drill in our ocean from a nature point of view.

However, there is once again the selfish monetary reason not to drill. When spills happen, local economies are devastated. Id the local economy has anything to do with the ocean all of that commerce ceases, and all of the dollars from tourism plummet. In places like California and Florida , those tourism dollars are HUGE. We as states simply can’t afford to risk that such a spill might cost us those dollars forever (it takes years and years to clean up some spills)."