Two New Jersey Plutocrats Join Forces to Oppose Offshore Drilling

Apparently, record-high energy prices haven't had the same effect on Jon Corzine and Frank Lautenberg as last week's Pew Poll noted they have had on a somewhat more representative sample of Americans. NJ Governor Corzine, the former Goldman Sachs chief, and U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg, D-NJ, one of the founders of ADP, got together with a couple of their less-affluent political colleagues in the Jersey Shore town of Belmar today to express their opposition to offshore drilling (The Record: "Corzine, others vow to fight offshore drilling").

On The Record's website, a lone commenter, "RamapoGuy" dissents from the Plutocrats' opinion on offshore drilling. After first noting that offshore rigs in the Gulf didn't spill oil even during Hurricane Katrina, he writes,

Alaskans get oil revenue checks each year..why can't we? We listened to the wackos in the 80's who said Nuclear energy would kill us all and now we are looking into Nuclear once more. If we would have ignored them back then, we would be in a better position today. We need to look at the current drilling technologies and start drilling something. We will always need oil so even if the oil is 10 years away, if we start exploring now, we will have it in 10 years. If we do nothing, we will have it never! Start drilling for oil and send a message to OPEC that we are starting to look elsewhere for oil.

Whom do you imagine has a better chance of getting his way on this, RamapoGuy or Jon Corzine and Frank Lautenberg? This is another reason to be confident in the secular bull market trend in oil continuing for another five years.