Drilling and environmental protection: the pendulum swings.

The pendulum swings, always back and forth, never stopping in the center, and so the ramifications of the Gulf oil spill will play out.

Environmental damage has led to restrictions on drilling, off our coasts, north, west and east. Then, with the middle east situation, a new push for energy independence and more competition for petroleum products, the "drill baby, drill" mantra is again being heard.

Now, with this horrible spill, the voices for more drilling will be all but silenced for a time. However, with demand for oil rising even faster than the world's population, prices will go up while supplies become limited. The oil producing countries of the middle east, growing less enamored of the US due to our policy of making friends with them by making war on them, will be happy to sell to growing Asian economies, hungry to develop and to put their newly affluent people behind the wheel of autos.

So, in a very few years, collective memory being all too short, Americans will forget this spill and the call for drilling will again be loud and clear. And since the pendulum keeps swinging, another spill will start the cycle over again.

The reality is that until we develop alternative sources of energy well enough to end our dependence of fossil fuels, the pressure to drill will continue. Given a choice between drilling in ecologically sensitive areas and taking millions of cars off the roads, Americans will conveniently forget what is happening in the Gulf.

So, what can we do? Accountability is the key. When we allow an oil company to drill, there must be stipulations, rigid controls. We need further research into safety, with our government and the oil companies engaged in the best engineering and science. Once best practices are codified, these would be the law of the land regarding any new drilling, constantly updated as new knowledge is gained.

Would this be 100% effective? Nothing is 100%, but done right, we could raise the bar to very nearly 100%. When our river levies that are built to 25 or 50 year flood standards fail, we usually upgrade to 100 year protection, which all but prevents any further failure. The same type of thinking should apply to drilling, even though this would be done by a public and private mandated team effort.