Gas is well over $4 a gallon in most places in California — and soaring elsewhere as well. But are such high energy prices good or bad?
That should be a stupid question. Yet it is not, when the Obama administration has stopped new domestic offshore oil exploration in many American waters, curbed oil leases in the West, and keeps oil-rich areas of Alaska exempt from drilling. Last week, President Obama went to Brazil and declared of that country’s new offshore finds: “With the new oil finds off Brazil, President [Dilma] Rousseff has said that Brazil wants to be a major supplier of new stable sources of energy, and I’ve told her that the United States wants to be a major customer, which would be a win-win for both our countries.”
Consider the logic of the president’s Orwellian declaration: The United States in the last two years has restricted oil exploration of the sort Brazil is now rushing to embrace. We have run up more than $4 trillion in consecutive budget deficits during the Obama administration and are near federal insolvency. Therefore, the United States should be happy to borrow more money to purchase the sort of “new stable sources of energy” from Brazil’s offshore wells that we most certainly will not develop off our own coasts.
It seems as if paying lots more for electricity and gas, in European fashion, was originally part of the president’s new green agenda. He helped push cap-and-trade legislation through the House of Representatives in 2009. Had such Byzantine regulations become law, a recessionary economy would have sunk into depression. Obama appointed the incompetent Van Jones as “green-jobs czar” — until Jones’s wild rantings confirmed that he knew nothing about his job description “to advance the administration’s climate and energy initiatives.”
At a time of trillion-dollar deficits, the administration is borrowing billions to promote high-speed rail, and is heavily invested in the federally subsidized $42,000 Government Motors Chevy Volt. Apparently the common denominator here is a deductive view that high energy prices will force Americans to emulate European centrally planned and state-run transportation.
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Why don't we simply turn on the billions of land based oil wells we have drilled and turned off 50+ years ago? Don't even need to drill! Produce it at ten cents a gallon, and use the profits to reroof all houses with solar panels! Put up LAND based windmills in the fields! Research storage for night use.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a great idea 5:02pm, but your ideas have not been adapted by the rightest ones...so your ideas are not acceptable. Doing what's good for the people is only acceptable if Big Business is on the receiving end.
ReplyDeleteWell, if the Government quit driving around in Chevy Suburbans that get 13 mpg, maybe we wouldn't need to buy electric cars. They're using all the gas up!
ReplyDeleteWhy have I heard that there are already hundreds of oil leases with the US that aren't being exploited? Oil corporations don't couldn't care less about where the oil comes from. Their job is to make a profit. What is the basis for equating domestic extraction with lower prices? You say it as though it's a given. It's not as though oil from any well anywhere is of the same quality or quantity. Given similar quantities, isn't the quality of what is extracted the main issue as to how profitable that extraction will be? So again, do you know why existing domestic leases aren't being utilized? You make it sound as though you think that oil companies' main objective is to keep the cost of a gallon of gas in the US to a minimum. Is that really what you think the main objective of an international conglomerate is? Finally, there's that old axiom that never fails: "Follow the money". I've read that commodity futures firms have far greater influence than any goverment or oil company on the price we pay for oil. How will domestic drilling affect that? Anonymous basically said the same thing as I am, just with far fewer words!
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