McKinney states her opposition to offshore drilling—and the whole notion of chasing after increasingly expensive and hard-to-reach petroleum reserves—in simple but dramatic terms.
“My message is to ‘leave the oil in the soil,’” McKinney told Grist in an August 2008 interview. “Right now we've got two energy policies in this country. One is war, the other is drilling. And neither one of them works. We've got to do something different.”
According to McKinney, “We need to take offshore drilling off the table” as a potential solution to America’s energy crisis, along with nuclear energy and drilling for oil in ANWR, and start investing more heavily in renewable energy.