President Obama wanted $5 gasoline and now he has it. He’s trying to avoid any responsibility for making it happen. Funny thing about a pending election and how it changes one’s perspective.
He says Republicans’ have only one response. Drill. Could that be the right answer? One the president avoids at any cost. If you don’t want your country to be subject to global oil prices the only solution seems to be to produce more of your own. We are seeing natural gas prices at the lowest level in decades. Why? Drilling. The evil oil industry with zero help from Obama has fracked us into a surplus natural gas situation. Since we can’t export, yet, supply and demand in this country has driven natural gas prices to new lows. Saving homeowners and commercial users millions of dollars. Windmills didn’t make this happen. Nor did solar panels, the Obama energy strategy stalwarts. Nor did electric cars. Drilling did it.
If we don’t want to buy 70% of our crude at the global oil price, we need more domestic production. We need the Keystone Pipeline to bring us heavy oil from Canada at discount prices to Gulf Coast refineries that can utilize heavy crude and where transportation pipelines can take the gasoline to big cities in the Midwest and East Coast. We need permits issued on offshore drilling sites. We need permits issued on Alaskan oil where the pipeline from Alaska is drying up due to supply. We need to do everything Obama is stopping. We need to stop everything Obama is doing.
If Obama spins the usual reasons for high gasoline prices, don’t listen. He held senate hearings the last time this happened. This is a circus that has been running since Jimmy Carter. He will point to the futures market. If this were true why isn’t corn $100 a bushel? Or wheat or pork or any of the other commodities that are traded on the global futures market? Why just oil? Or his last solution, draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Here are the facts. Offshore is down 30% since Obama took office. Rocky Mountain federal lands are down 70% under Obama. He has held 85% of the outer shelf off limits. Only 3% of federal lands are available for lease. Obama says domestic production is up. It’s up due to francking and many in his party and administration want to stop that.
Here’s a quote from his energy secretary, Chu. President Barack Obama’s Energy secretary unwittingly created a durable GOP talking point in September 2008 when he talked to The Wall Street Journal about the benefits of having gasoline prices rise over 15 years to encourage energy efficiency.
“Somehow,” Chu said, “we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
Chu, a Nobel-winning physicist and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was not yet a member of the not-yet-in-existence Obama administration. But Republican politicians and conservative pundits have seized on his words as evidence that the White House is deliberately driving gasoline prices higher — ensuring that Chu’s remarks are the energy policy sound bite that will not die
Obama continues to say we can’t drill our way out of this. That is not true. We have in short order with natural gas and we could with crude oil. We just need a new president with a new plan. And, a new Energy Secretary who is not blowing billions investing in bad wind and solar ideas.
