Oil Drilling Off the Coast

In your article “Deukmejian’s Chicanery on the Coast� one has to wonder what chicanery Deukmejian is trying to pull. Lifting the moratorium on Outer Continental Shelf oil exploration is not chicanery, it is common sense. We may desperately need that oil in the five or six years it takes to bring it on line. It would certainly insure our future economy.

As for Ann Notthoff and Trent W. Orr bemoaning the Governor’s reduced support for the Coastal Commission, the Commission has been “protecting� our coast for the past 15 years and there isn’t a beach left that’s fit to swim in. It’s like Mayor Tom Bradley disallowing oil drilling in the Santa Monica Bay because it might pollute it, while he poured millions of gallons of undertreated sewage into it every day. Maybe if he had had the income from offshore oil production he could have afforded the sewage treatment plant that would have saved the Bay.

We don’t have an oil crisis now because of the Western World’s increased oil production in answer to OPECs blackmail. But OPEC is now instigating a price war to lull the West into cutting their production. And if we fall for that scenario we will soon be back in the energy crunch that so devastated our economy and security before.

It’s not something we should want to return to.

GOLDIE JOSEPH

Newport Beach