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Gold/Mining/Energy : coastal caribbean (cco@) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Henry Volquardsen who wrote (1117)	11/12/1999 3:09:00 AM
From: Edwin S. Fujinaka	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4686

Henry,...I find myself agreeing with you on most of these issues of civil liberties and libertarianism. Perhaps we ought to address the other issue of environmentalism too. Milton Friedman once said that we really didn't want to have no pollution, we needed the right amount of pollution. The basis for this comment was the fact that zero pollution was only attainable at a price that no one wanted to pay. The actual damage to the environment posed by offshore oil drilling is pretty minor. Florida already has many onshore drilling sites that already pose a greater visual impact than the offshore rigs would pose. Florida already even has a nuclear power plant too. The real environmental damage to Florida that an offshore drilling site poses is quite small unless there were a major spill and no one did anything about it. Florida's nuclear power plant poses a far greater risk already. I can easily live with a total ban on offshore oil production if the State of Florida acts within the law. Fairness to Coastal Petroleum can be achieved if Florida just simply follows the law. The three judge appeals court panel spelled it out. Florida can ban drilling by paying "just compensation". I don't believe a total ban on offshore Florida drilling will be maintained forever. I don't even believe that it is wise to impose a total ban today. I think it would be wise to actually drill and determine if there is a hugh oil field under the offshore Florida waters. If there is a lot of oil there, the United States could treat it as a strategic oil reserve and cap the wells for possible future use. Treating the Apalachicola Embayment Oil as a bad thing that Americans want to deny exists seems incredibly stupid to me. If foreign powers control the World's oil supply in the future, they can create a situation where the US has to go to war. This would be less likely if the US had a large supply of oil within it's own control. Finally, I don't think the current price of CCO stock is going to be of any real importance. Sometime within the next two or three years (if not sooner) a real appraised value will be determined. The stock price will then be based on a simple calculation and today's price will be irrelevent. Nothing that we do in terms of generating publicity will have much effect on that appraised valuation. I know that it would make us all feel better to see a higher current stock price, but what difference would it make in the long run? Sorry for the disjointed rambling, but perhaps the best course is just to let the legal case take it's course.