By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
Anti-drilling wackadoos are gathering in A.C. today to bitch about a federal offshore oil exploration plan, Save Jerseyans, and not unlike the anti-vaxxer crowd, their command of the facts is less-than-impressive.
Politicians are playing on their fears. Bob Menendez (D-Dominican Republic/Ecuador/FCI Petersburg Low) even posted this absurd graphic on his Facebook page:
Shameless! And kind of evil. It’s time for a brief, painfully simple math/science lesson: if you’re a hypothetical 5′ 7” man or woman standing on the beach looking at the water, the horizon is around 2.9 miles out; the globe, FYI, is not flat and our eyes are VERY complicated pieces of machinery:
On top of a 100-foot hill? Tower? Condo complext? The horizon rests at a distance of approximately 12.2 miles.
With all of that in mind, you should know that the the drilling buffer incorporated into the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s proposal sits at 50 miles of our coast, or more than 17-times further out than a Jersey Shore beachgoer could see while standing on the sand.
It’s science:
So Hudson Bob’s graphic is deliberately misleading. No one sitting on the beach can see an oil rig unless they’re a native born resident of the planet Krypton who received executive amnesty from President Obama.
It’s time to cut through the B.S. and focus on facts.
The benefits of off shore drilling for our economy and foreign policy are clear, the environmental/tourism threat is exaggerated, and if we’re being honest, liberal hostility to the related pipeline issue has engendered an even-more-dangerous oil-by-rail phenomenon.
Anyone who can’t see THAT doesn’t want to, and I have no time for them.
