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Oliver Dixon asks if the resumption of offshore oil drilling will have any effect on US fuel prices.
Page 9
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It can't be a whole load of fun belng the US President at the end of your second term and feeling your relevance dimlnish. And so George Bush's decision to lift the moratorium imposed 18 years ago by his father on offshore oil drilling has been regarded, at least in part, as an action by a man who finds the limelight landing on others, and doesn't like It.
Americans are finally getting their heads around the fact that high oil prices are here to stay. The notion that a government could wave some fiscal magic ward or, for that matter, a drilling rig and return US fuel prices to $2 a gallon is now rightly seen by many as laughable. And yet there remains a firmly held view within some sections of US society one led by the more overtly Republican media that $2 a gallon is not a pipe dream, but something that is resolutely achievable.
This rather flies in the face of the reality of the current situation, which is seeing US road transport companies go under en masse.
How they must feel when they are accused by those same media commentators of business Incompetence as opposed to sheer bad luck is difficult to judge. But, like their counterparts in the UK, many US hauliers are now finding it nigh-on impossible to make the numbers add up. Can any business survive a 60% increase in its primary operating cost and still hope to survive?
Bush wants to drill for more oil, and, in doing so, reduce the price at the pump. At which point everything will be better.
The increasingly cynical US public has some difficulty in believing this and who can really blame them?