Heidi Alexander: “I rise to speak on what I call an oilspill response for grownups. The tragic gulf oilspill has produced overreaction…”

“I rise to speak on what I call an oilspill response for grownups. The tragic gulf oilspill has produced overreaction, demagoguery, and bad policy. I would cite ``Obama's Katrina, end offshore drilling, produce 20 percent of our electricity from windmills'' as three examples of overreaction, demagoguery, and bad policy. None of these options helps clean up and move forward a country using 25 percent of the world's energy, as the United States does year-in and year-out. If we Americans want both clean energy and a high standard of living, then here are 10 steps for thoughtful grownups: No. 1, figure out what went wrong and make it unlikely to happen again. We do not stop flying after a terrible airplane crash, and we are not going to stop drilling offshore after this terrible spill. Thirty percent of U.S. oil production and 25 percent of our natural gas production come from thousands of active wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Without it, gasoline prices would skyrocket, and we would depend more on tankers from the Middle East with worse safety records than American offshore drillers.”