As much as I love the environment, I also know a lot about it. Offshore oil drilling has very little actual effect on the environment. Sure, radical environmentalists raise a huge uproar when an oil tanker goes down and makes all the cute, fuzzy seals sick, but they don't seem to care a bit when a Navy vessel sinks and even more people die. The realistic risk to the environment from offshore oil drilling is very minimal. It is also much safer to ship oil to shore than it is to ship it from the Middle East.

As far as global warming is concerned, all scientists have really proven is that the temperature of the world is slowly rising. Many scientists believe this is because the earth's axis is not perfectly balanced, causing a very long term climate change. They believe this could have caused the ice age long ago before people were alive to pollute the world. While pollutants are most likely chipping away at our atmosphere and certainly spreading deadly toxins around the air we breathe, they won't be destroying the world any time soon. We definitely need to make a shift towards renewable clean energy as soon as possible, and the oil shortages have been pushing us in that direction, but we have much more important problems to address first.

It is easy to get swept up in the environmental hype, but we need to keep our heads about us. Realistically speaking, a bunch of offshore oil rigs won't destroy the world, but they will alleviate a huge financial crisis that is forcing many families to struggle to survive. So before we go up in arms screaming to save the trees, let's start by saving our own children.