Bounty and the beaches

Two wrongs never make a right, but two bad environment-related ideas could ultimately produce a public good.

Beach restoration is the first ill-conceived idea. Even a desert rat like me knows that spending millions of taxpayer dollars to pour sand on an eroding beach is an expensive exercise in futility. Nothing beats the sea.

Bad idea No. 2 is the senseless ban on offshore exploration and extraction of the huge deposits of oil and natural gas reserves off the U.S. outer continental shelf. Fear-mongering about the miniscule potential for oil spills fuels congressional and presidential moratoriums

However, North Carolina's addiction to beach sand could eventually help trump the ban on offshore drilling, according to U.S. Rep. Walter Jones. How? The usual culprit: money.

Outside of congressionally snuck-in budget earmarks, the feds are trying to cut back on pointless domestic spending like beach renourishment. If we North Carolinians want to continue to feed sand into the ocean, we're going to have to pay for it ourselves.

But state legislators from inland areas prefer to waste tax dollars on projects like teapot museums. If future coastal restoration projects are going to be fully funded, new sources of public money must be discovered.

That financial reserve, Jones has been quoted as saying, may lie deep in the Atlantic.

Last week the U.S. House of Representatives took the first step at getting at it when it voted, 232 to 187, to lift the congressional moratorium and allow states to decide whether to allow drilling off their coastlines (Jones voted with the majority). While $3-a-gallon gasoline grabbed headlines as the reason for bipartisan support, I think Jones identified the real cause. Up to 75 percent of the payments from new offshore oil and gas leases would go to the states. That could be some serious cash.

Only a fraction of the outer continental shelf is now open to exploration, so the revenue potential of the House bill is enormous. The 8,000 active oil and gas leases, nearly all in the Gulf of Mexico, generate approximately $5 billion for the government per year. That's chump change compared to the cash that could be produced for the states by the estimated 76 billion barrels of oil and 406.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas currently off-limits offshore.

About 5 trillion square feet of that untouched natural gas reserve lies off the Outer Banks. The potential revenue could buy a lot of beach sand.

Despite the House vote, the congressional moratorium is safe for at least another year. The Senate isn't going to passing similar legislation this year. But even ardent moratorium supporters on Capitol Hill admit the mood in the upper chamber is changing. The nation could use the energy now, but time is needed to reverse the intellectual damage caused by oil-hating environmentalists.

For example, I cheered when I heard the House bill passed. People in the group I was with looked at me as if I were nuts. One demanded that I commit to cleaning up the first spill. No problem, I replied. Oil platforms don't spill. Even Hurricane Katrina and her angry friends didn't produce a significant offshore spill.

Besides, oil seepage occurs naturally every day. According to the National Academy of Sciences, approximately 62 percent of the oil that turns up in U.S. waters seeps through the ocean floor. Nearly all the rest comes from spills from boaters and oil tankers. Lifting the moratorium would make the oceans cleaner. The more oil platforms off our shores, the fewer oil-leaking tankers in our waters. And, according the National Academy, oil platform technology is now so advanced and the structures so strong only .001 percent of the oil extracted in U.S. waters over the past 20 years was spilled.

You would have thought I had just declared ketchup a vegetable. My friends didn't believe a word.

That's why every North Carolina politician, especially Sens. Elizabeth Dole and Richard Burr, who advocate energy independence and a clean environment, must stand up to the tourism and environmental special-interests and demand a fact-based offshore drilling debate.

One day North Carolinians will decide whether or not to allow energy extraction off the coast. That decision deserves to be grounded in scientific reality and not outdated, politically driven myth.