Krauthammer: Don't Forget Why We're Drilling in Ultra Deep Water

Forget about Obama's incompetence or BP's mistakes or anything else. Charles Krauthammer makes the most important point about this oil spill by asking, "Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?" The answer, of course, is environmentalism, who have prohibited oil companies from getting the very easy sources of oil.

Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, weve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

And just as Rachel Carson never is mentioned as a huge reason that malaria still kills millions of children in Africa, environmentalists will escape any scrutiny for this too.