By Alan Caruba
On April 18th I received an email from the Sierra Club announcing that “We’re endorsing President Obama for reelection. We’ve made too much progress over the past four years to give it all back to Big Polluters.”
Among the Sierra Club’s many projects to plunge the nation back to the golden days of reading by candle light and transportation by horse has been “Beyond Oil.” It praised the President for implementing “the toughest fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks in history.” Never mind that this has driven up the cost of cars and trucks or that the price of gasoline at the pump is headed toward historic highs.
The Center for Automotive Research has warned that overly stringent standards could add $10,000 to the cost of a new car, thereby decreasing sales, reducing production, and thereby destroying as many as 220,000 jobs. A 2002 National Academy of Sciences study concluded that CAFÉ’s downsizing effect makes cars less safe and contributed to as many as 2,600 deaths per year.
The enemy for the Sierra Club and others like Friends of the Earth has long been coal and oil, but coincidently on the same day, the U.S. Department of the Interior, no friend to either energy source, released its “Global Estimate for Undiscovered, Technically Recoverable Conventional Oil and Gas Resources.” It is an assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey.
U.S. has Largest Energy Reserves on Earth
The estimate, however, excluded data on the U.S. resources. In March 2011, however, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report that revealed that America’s combined energy reserves are the largest on Earth. We sit atop an estimated 163 billion barrels of oil, domestic and offshore. The U.S. accounts for more than 28% of the world’s coal reserves, at least 262 billion tons. Natural gas? We have, conservatively, an estimated 2,047 trillion cubic feet.
The worldwide estimates for recoverable oil are in the billions of barrels but thanks to Obama’s Interior Department fewer leases to explore and extract it on federal owned lands have been issued and some have been reversed. When you add in the fiasco caused by two moratoriums on drilling the Gulf of Mexico, both ruled illegal by the courts, the true intent of the administration is well known and established.
In the wake of Earth Day with all its usual lies about “peak oil”, the “Global Estimate” concluded that the world “holds an estimated 585 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable conventional oil.” In addition, it estimated that were is “5,606 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable conventional natural gas” and “167 barrels” of comparable natural gas liquids.”
For reasons known only to those who set energy policy in the U.S., according to the Institute for Energy Research, “fossil fuel (coal, oil, and natural gas) production on Federal and Indian lands is the lowest in the nine (9) years” that the U.S. Energy Information Administration has issued such reports. It is six percent less than in Fiscal year 2010.
Americans are being deliberately starved of the energy sources we have in abundance.
We are being robbed in the form of higher prices for electricity produced in the most expensive fashion, wind and solar, instead of affordable coal. Not only are gasoline prices up, but the government continues to demand more mileage per gallon of gas.
The result of the environmental organizations propaganda to demonize oil and coal, and the Obama administration’s anti-energy policies, has been the loss of revenues, as well as jobs, from royalties and taxes paid to the government. Meanwhile, Americans have watched the Obama administration loan guarantees to solar industry corporations waste well over a billion taxpayer dollars.
As for wind energy, Reuters reporter Andy Sullivan recently reported that the industry actually “shed 10,000 jobs since 2009 even as the energy capacity of wind farms doubled.” To put this in context, Sullivan also reported that “the oil and gas industry has added 75,000 jobs since Obama took office.”
The Obama administration energy policies have been a thorough-going failure that puts in jeopardy the ability of the nation’s energy industries ability to keep up with demands for more electricity and more fuel for its automotive and truck fleets.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Alan - what can one say? These Greeny communists are all over the place. They have infiltrated everywhere using their Green Trojan Horse to push what they've wanted to do to the USA for years - destroy it. These idiots have been indoctrinated since the 1960s and believe that America is bad. Today you are reaping the fruits of all that hard work by the communists. Russia didn't have to lift a military finger to destroy the country - all they had to do was infiltrate the minds of the gullible with their failed communist propaganda. I attended a talk by James Delingpole last night - what a breath of fresh air. He uses mockery to out these scumbags. We really need to treat these Green idiots with the contempt they deserve. We need to give them the message loud and clear and stop worrying about their feelings and the PC way to do it. I don't know about others, but I'm sick of pandering and allowing these groups to hijack our lives.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read that article, I couldn't help but think of the last chapter of ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand when the USA economy has been reduced to barter and the best transcontinental transportation system is the wagon train.
ReplyDeleteThank goodness ATLAS SHRUGGED was fiction!
"We are being robbed in the form of higher prices for electricity produced in the most expensive fashion, wind and solar, instead of affordable coal."
ReplyDeletenot to mention that these economic follies often don't deliver any energy at all.