Offshore Oil or Offshore Wind?

What should we be building off our coasts: wind turbines or oil derricks?
The United States has suffered through seven and a half years of energy policy created by two oil executives, with little to show but higher prices and billions in wasted subsidies. John McCain last week decided to double down on this dubious bet by giving energy companies whatever they want. Last week, he announced that he would open up coastal waters for oil drilling. To add insult to McCain's self-inflicted political injury, George Bush echoed his call within a few hours. Thus John McCain spent another week tarnishing his brand as independent of his party's conventional wisdom. After having shown himself willing to commit the heresy of taking climate change seriously, he decided that maybe we should be burning more hydrocarbons after all.
Joe Biden, speaking on Meet the Press, pointed out that oil companies already have enormous offshore reserves at their disposal:

This is a gift, a gift to the oil companies by John McCain. They have now leased 41 million acres of offshore leases. They're only pumping in 10.2 million of those acres. Seventy-nine percent of all the offshore oil available off the coast of Florida, into the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Coast, the Pacific Coast, lies within those acres that they now have.

Even supporters of increased offshore drilling acknowledge that it would take as long as ten years to get more gasoline to the pumps. But if we're talking ten years, why go with an old, dying technology? If we get a go-ahead from the General Assembly, we could have the first offshore wind power project in the U.S. up and running in three years.
So it would take the U.S. three times longer to prop up the fossil fuels business by ruining our coastal waters than it would to get offshore wind power going. Apart from the question of which you would rather see off your coast, the new clean technology will do more, sooner to provide us with needed energy than the dirty old business could.
Beyond weakening his reputation for independence, John McCain has shown himself to be the candidate of the past instead of the future.