To drill or not to drill?

On the domestic front I can't think of a subject that is more on people's minds these days than the price of oil.

Everyone is impacted but not everyone reacts the same way to the impact, nor does everyone draw the same conclusions about what those impacts signify or portend. Lately there has been renewed debate on what to do with American oil and natural gas reserves in areas currently off limits to development...ANWR and the Pacific coastal shelf being the two highest profile examples. It seems to me that this debate is critical but that it is complicated by different ways of framing the question, different agendas, and differing sets of "factual" assumptions.

Here's an essay written by Robert Rapier writing in an energy blog R-Squared that attempts to frame a rational approach to this burning question. Read the whole thing.
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