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Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling


Too bad it's not in U.S. waters

You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil.

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.

But look on the bright side. If President Obama has embraced offshore drilling in Brazil, why not in the old U.S.A.? The land of the sorta free and the home of the heavily indebted has enormous offshore oil deposits, and last year ahead of the November elections, with gasoline at $4 a gallon, Congress let a ban on offshore drilling expire.

GO HERE to read more.

9 comments:

tedh said...

Let me get this correct...We borrow from China then lend to Brazil...is it just me but?

Anonymous said...

#1 oil we not the remedy to our energy problems

#2 hopefully we'll make a higher return on the money than the interest paid for our borrowing

tedh said...

#1 Oil is the short term remedy for our energy problems but we need to pursue alternative energy sources for the near future. We are heading the right direction but we need a quick solution now.

#2 If that was the case why don't they borrow money from China?

#3 Are we against off shore drilling or just offshore drilling off the coast of the USA.

Anonymous said...

their doing it for royalty's, kick-back, shares, ect.....bet your sweet a$$ we wont see any return....

Anonymous said...

Please, shoot me now.

This is totally unbelievable.
The global warming crowd and other wackos have stopped us from drilling here, but it's OK to drill there? Maybe it's a different globe.

I'll bet that Hugo Chávez gets his hooks into this somehow, with Obama's blessing.

Orsonwells said...

I guess I have to ask for the dumbass award when I ask the question. The idiocy is stupendous. The questions... endlesss. The answers? may equate to WTF???.

Go solar and wind, drill at home to accomplish the goal, call it a day.

Can anybody say, "DUH?" This crap is getting old before it gets better.

There has to be some monetary reason we cling to foreign oil, but other than the "use theirs first" mantra, I can't see it.

Anonymous said...

We do not have "enormous offshore oil deposits" so this article is wrong.

Anonymous said...

Pray for our country people, this Wana-be-Dictator has a master plan and money from the far left is behind him.
God Help Us All
kn

ranger3325 said...

anon 6:22 you are wrong huge deposits have been found but we are not allowed to drill anywhere off the coast of the u.s. or are we allowed to build any new refineries or tap into the even easier yo acesss shale oil