Yesterday I hit a new record. It was $95 to fill my car with gasoline. In Chicago, the city with Emanuel values, the average price of gasoline in now $4.25. Due to pipeline problems, three area refineries doing routine maintenance, and a unique and expensive summer blend requirement, plus some of the highest gasoline taxes in the country, Chicago motorists are being hit incredibly hard.
The good news, without Canadian crude and a $2 billion investment in the BP refinery to process that crude, it would be worse. An investment that was fought tooth and nail by local politicians.
I have seen estimates that the Obama administration’s moratorium on offshore crude production is costing the country over $1 trillion in revenue over the life of the projected assets. That number is just short of the $1.2 trillion annual budget. Of course, with Obama, the actual spening is at least a trillion more than the budget. He can sure spend it, he just can’t generate the jobs or revenue to support his spending.
If we lifted his moratorium it would generate far more revenue than taxing the rich. Who pays the most for his moratorium, the poor. They get stuck with the $95 a tank gasoline bill. He’s no Robin Hood, he steals from the poor and gives it to Solyndar for campaign cash.
Will the oil companies be the scapegoats for the high price of gasoline in Chicago, as usual? Or will the blame fall on the real culprit, Obama?
This from Breitbart: April 2011
Obama imposes 5-year oil drilling moratorium on Atlantic coast
From Breitbart.
Excerpt:
Yesterday the Obama administration announced a delaying tactic which will put off the possibility of new offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast for at least five years:
The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell notes that a planned lease sale, which the administration cancelled last year, will now be put off until at least 2018. As you might expect, Republicans were not impressed with the decision:
“The president’s actions have closed an entire new area to drilling on his watch and cheats Virginians out of thousands of jobs,” said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee. The announcement “continues the president’s election-year political ploy of giving speeches and talking about drilling after having spent the first three years in office blocking, delaying and driving up the cost of producing energy in America,” he said.
This is in addition to the moratorium on drilling in the Gulf that Obama imposed before.
Excerpt:
A moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill plus a longer offshore oil and natural gas permitting processes will cost the U.S. more than $24 billion in lost oil and natural gas investment over the next several years, according to a report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute.
The study by the energy industry trade group also found that, because of the moratorium and longer permitting process, capital and operating expenditures fell over the last two years by $18.3 billion.
The region saw $8.9 billion and $146 billion in investments in crude oil and natural gas, respectively — about 6 percent of global investment dollars. But that figure would have been closer to 12 percent for 2011 had the drilling moratorium not been put in place, the report said.
“As a result of decreases in investment due to the moratorium, total U.S. employment is estimated to have been reduced by 72,000 jobs in 2010 and approximately 90,000 jobs in 2011,” the report said.
In addition to closing an entire new area to drilling, Obama is also using environmental regulations to destroy jobs and raise energy prices.
Excerpt:
Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the Obama administration is poised to deal a major blow to U.S. oil and natural gas, a leading industry group charged Thursday.
Domestic production of both fuels could plummet if proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations, designed to limit emissions from well sites, go into effect later this year, according to an extensive new study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute.
The natural gas extraction technique known as “fracking” would be hardest hit, and fuel extracted via the popular process would drop by about 52 percent, according to a new study commissioned by API. Total gas production would decrease by about 11 percent, while domestic oil production could fall by as much as 37 percent, the report says.
Make no mistake – this Democrat administration is opposed to job creation in the energy sector and opposed to lowering gas prices