DRILL, BABY, DRILL: USA Today: Allow Shell drilling in the Arctic.

What got lost in the avalanche of justly deserved bad publicity three years ago was that the actual drilling Shell managed to do went smoothly. This shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s largely forgotten now, but in the 1980s and early 1990s, Shell and other companies drilled about 100 exploratory wells in the Chukchi and the neighboring Beaufort Sea before abandoning the area for reasons that included low oil prices. Drilling there can be done safely.

Actually, in some ways, drilling in the Chukchi Sea is less risky than in the Gulf of Mexico, where BP notoriously lost control of its Macondo well five years ago in one of the worst spills in history. The BP well was in 5,000 feet of water, which made capping the blowout fiendishly difficult; in Alaska, Shell will be drilling in just 140 feet of water.

Well pressures will also be as much as five times less in Alaska, which lowers the risk of a blowout. Given the weather, the allowable drilling season is very short, running from July through part of October. . . .

Finally, the U.S. needs the kind of oil that could be found off Alaska. Alternative energy provided 7% of the country’s energy needs in 1990. A quarter century later, that has grown to barely 10%. Estimates of recoverable oil in the Arctic offshore run as high as 30 billion barrels, equal to some of the biggest oil fields in the world.

Producing that oil will take a decade or more, which means decisions made today will affect consumers in 2025 or later. That’s prudent planning. Shell should go ahead.

Also, many of the world’s worst actors are oil kleptocracies. The more oil we produce, the less money they have.