Yet another example of why this country would be in even more trouble if the Democrats are left in charge:

With gasoline topping $4 a gallon, President Bush urged Congress on Wednesday to lift its long-standing ban on offshore oil and gas drilling, saying the United States needs to increase its energy production. Democrats quickly rejected the idea.

…

“This is not something that’s going to give consumers short-term relief and it is not a long-term solution to our problems with fossil fuels generally and oil in particular,” said Obama. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, lumping Bush with McCain, accused them of staging a “cynical campaign ploy” that won’t help lower energy prices.

“Despite what President Bush, John McCain and their friends in the oil industry claim, we cannot drill our way out of this problem,” Reid said. “The math is simple: America has just three percent of the world’s oil reserves, but Americans use a quarter of its oil.”

For the past several years, people on both sides of the aisle have been complaining that this country is far too dependant on foreign sources of energy. So, how can we reduce this dependence? Simple: we produce more energy domestically. What is one way we can start doing that now? We can start allowing the oil companies to conduct oil exploration on the Continental Shelf and in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Also, we can allow the oil companies to build more refineries to use this oil to produce gasoline and other products.

There is, of course, one problem with this: The Democrats and thier Environmental-Wacko special interests won’t allow the oil companies to build new refineries or explore for more domestic oil. Why? Because they think exploring ANWR is going to kill all of the Caribu and exploring offshore areas will destroy the beaches. Finally, there is one big reason the Democrats do not want to allow drilling in these areas: they want to keep gasoline prices high until after the 2008 Presidential Election so that they can use this issue to show that Republicans haven’t done anything about it. Yes, they think that their political agenda is more important than actually doing something to solve the problem. I guess that this is supposed to be the big “change” that Obama is all about.

ANWR consists of well over 19 million acres of land. Underneath this land it is estimated that there are billions and billions of barrels of recoverable oil. This is oil we could use, if only Congressional Democrats would look beyond their own self-interest. Instead, Democrats just complain about how the big oil companies are only pushing this to get even more rich than they already are. This country needs energy, and all the Democrats care about is that someone will make some money out of the deal for going and getting it. How much sense does that make? Are they supposed to do it for free? Do Democrats know that this country is based upon capitalism?

If you ask a Democrat what they would suggest to relieve the problem, they tell you that we need to develop new sources of energy and that we should conserve more. Let’s take a look at these ideas:

• Developing New Sources of Energy:  Well, this certainly would be nice. However, it would take at least 10 to 12 years before any newly developed source of energy would be able to replace fossil fuels. First, this new source of energy would have to be discovered and developed into something which is at least as efficient and plentiful as gasoline. Next, the infrastructure of the country would have to be modified to use this new energy source. Do you know how many pieces of infrastructure currently use gasoline and petroleum products? Do you know how much it would cost, and how long it would take, to either replace or modify all of these infrastructure components to use this new energy source? This is impractical at best.
• Conserve More Energy: Again, this is a good idea, but it will hardly resolve this crisis. Look at this example: California is the state which conserves the most energy each year. I mean, they’ve got people recycling everything, they have water restrictions, energy restrictions, you name it, they conserve it. So, what does all of this conservation amount to? Every summer for the past few years California has rolling brownouts due to lack of available energy. In fact, one year it got so bad they recalled the Governor. There is absolutely no way the US can conserve its way out of an energy shortage.

So, would opening up AMWR and the Continental Shelf for oil exploration and drilling put an immediate end to our problems? Of course not. It would take a few years before the infrastructure was in place so that we could start pumping the oil out of the ground. However, even if we had this oil now, it is likely we couldn’t do much with it because Congress refuses to allow oil companies to build more refineries. Remember, you not only have to get the oil, you have to make it into something we can use. The refineries in the US are almost always running at full capacity. Remember when Katrina hit and a couple of refineries in the Gulf were put out of commission? Prices skyrocketed because production of gasoline was greatly impaired for a short period of time. Needless to say, if the US had more refinery capacity, we could produce more energy. However, Democrats and their Environmentalist-Wacko friends don’t want that because oil companies will make money by increasing their refining capacity, and they’re (oil companies) just too evil to allow that.

Even the Obamessiah thinks like this. I thought he was well-educated? Hasn’t he heard of the Law of Supply and Demand as it applies to prices? I’ve never taken a single economics class, but even I know that if you want the price of a certain commodity to fall, you increase the amount of that commodity which is available on the market. In this light, how can they sit there and say “we can’t drill our way out of this?”

If Obama gets elected, two years from now we’ll all be sitting around remembering the good ol’ days when gas was only $4.15 a gallon.

 Print This Post

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 5:09 pm by Nick, and is filed under Energy, Environmental Wackos, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.