By Alan Caruba
Don Young, (R-Alaska) ranking member of the Committee on Natural Resources sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to members of both parties of the House to remind them that, as energy prices rise steadily, “Congress is doing nothing to ease the pain at the pump.”
As Rep. Young put it, up to now the policy has been to:
Say NO to ANWR’s 30-year, one million barrels a day supply of American oil.
So NO to an estimated two trillion barrels of American shale oil.
Say NO to clean-burning natural gas.
Say NO to clean coal.
So NO to energy exploration in the 85% of the United States’ outer continental shelf.
Say NO to more energy exploration in the Intermountain West.
Say NO to more hydropower energy.
Say NO to more nuclear energy.
Say NO to any form of energy that will provide meaningful relief from record high energy prices.
Say NO to 90% of the energy that fuels America’s economy.
In truth, Congress has done nothing for four decades and that’s how far behind we are if they were to actually do something tomorrow.
You can’t drill for oil, lay pipelines, refine and transport crude oil overnight. The whole process takes years to build the infrastructure.
For reasons beyond my understanding, both Democrat and Republican Congresses have utterly failed and/or refused to either understand or do anything.
That makes Americans their victims. That means everyone who drives a car or truck is being penalized for stupidity, incompetence, and a situation that has put us at the mercy of nations, some of whom do not like us very much.
Worse, if one just looked at the Alaskan National Wilderness Refuge, the one that environmentalists want to keep in its “pristine” purity for the sake of some caribou and other critters, what is really at stake is 2,000 acres out of 19.6 million!
What’s more, Democrats and environmentalists want to lock up an additional 27.8 billion barrels in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea! That’s why the Bush administration’s Department of Interior is being pressured to declare polar bears “endangered” when every expert on that population says they’re not.
At $120.00 a barrel, we will send $500 billion to foreign governments and hostile dictators in 2008 alone.
At $120.00 a barrel, opening up ANWR would generate $183.5 billion in income tax and royalty revenue that would flow to the federal government over the 30-year lifetime of the field.
If I could tell you why the Democrats oppose this, I would. I do know that Hillary Clinton is talking about confiscating “windfall” profits from the oil companies. Never mind that, for several years, they weren't make that much and what they're making now helps them gear up to meet our energy needs. I can't think of a worse way to discourage them from building new refineries and doing the hugely expensive exploration we need.
This is, in so many ways, so sinister one might reasonably conclude that the Democrat Party—that hasn’t had a new idea since the 1940s—is deliberately acting to harm us all.
That’s something to think about when you step into the voting booth in November.
Even during the Cold War, with the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction, I did not find politics frightening. Now, when I have such limited resources of my own, I find my government out to impoverish me with higher and higher food and fuel costs. Now, I'm afraid.
ReplyDeleteAlen: Great Artical We need 400 more Reps just like him.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the 15year number I have heard for building a refinery or a Atom fueled power station:
How is it that starting from virtually nothing, we supplied and fought a two front war involving millions of people and pieces of equipment from machine guns to flattops AND WON in a little over 5years.
And yet today, the above regarding power and oil, the very lifeblood of the american economy, we can't fix in anything less than almost a generation.
Hogwash and B*****T.
Keep up the good work.
PC and Environmentalism will kill us all
LEE
It's not Dems alone. Since smiling Jimmy Carter created the DOE(to solve our energy problems) neither party has done anything to establish a comprehensive energy policy for the benefit of Americans. Only to our detriment.
ReplyDeleteWe keep hearing the politico speak about weaning the U.S. off foreign oil or becoming energy independent. It's BS. They don't want any of it because they have been bought and paid for by their pimps on K Street in D.C.
Why should they care? I've seen them riding around D.C. in their black Suburbans. They work 3 days a week and fly at our expense usually on their private Gulfstreams or Citations.
No it's all about power and keeping the peasants begging for mercy(more government).
What's it going to take before there is a march on D.C. with pitchforks and torches? $7, $8, $10 a gallon? $10 loaf of bread? I doubt that will do it because the potentates of politics will throw more of our taxes at it and then tell us everything is going to be fixed. And one year from now nothing will have changed.
Like they fixed it 30 years ago with the DOE.
A perfect storm is brewing aided and abetted by the fools in D.C. and it's only going to get worse.
Over the last 50 years you could look at D.C. and possibly think that on occasion a few mistakes or bad policies can be expected and chalk it up to coincidence. However, based on the suicidal direction they have been steering this country one can only conclude that there is a deliberate attempt to sabotage this nation.