Leadership Quote by Lois Capps

Calling drilling "the slowest, dirtiest, and most expensive" solution is a political framing move disguised as common sense. Lois Capps isn’t merely arguing against offshore rigs or new leases; she’s trying to win the definition of the problem. If the "energy crisis" is understood as a short-term supply crunch, drilling can be sold as urgent triage. Capps flips that: she implies the real crisis is structural (dependence, volatility, climate risk), and that drilling is a kind of expensive placebo that delays treatment.

The sentence works because of its stacked absolutes. "In reality" is a preemptive eye-roll at talking points, positioning her as the adult in the room. The triple hit - slowest, dirtiest, most expensive - collapses multiple audiences into one coalition: voters worried about gas prices (slowest), coastal communities and environmentalists (dirtiest), fiscal conservatives and deficit hawks (most expensive). It’s a compact indictment that suggests drilling fails on every metric that matters, not just the green ones.

Context matters: Capps, a California Democrat with a coastal constituency, spoke from a political geography where oil development is tied to visible local risk and a post-spill memory. The subtext is also about opportunity cost. Every dollar and legislative hour spent on new extraction is portrayed as a dollar and hour not spent on efficiency, renewables, grid upgrades - the faster, cleaner, cheaper suite she wants to be treated as the obvious baseline.