Energy: Extending existing oil leases as the president has proposed accomplishes nothing if the White House's environmental handcuffs won't let them be used. Lucy wants to hold the football for Charlie Brown again.
When President Obama said during his Saturday radio address that "we should increase safe and responsible oil production here at home," the operative words were "safe and responsible." We will drill if it's safe for polar bears, caribou and West Texas lizards, and if it doesn't contribute to the "climate change" myth.
Similar words were used to justify the seven-year moratorium on offshore drilling off both coasts, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and in the seas off Alaska following last year's Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf, even though no other wells were found to be unsafe.
The Associated Press reported with a straight face that "Obama is directing his administration to ramp up U.S. oil production." In fact, what he proposed is extending existing leases in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska and holding more frequent lease sales in a federal petroleum reserve in Alaska.
Using those leases is quite another matter.
Shell Oil, after investing five years and $4 billion, had to abandon attempts to drill off Alaska after Obama's Environmental Protection Agency withheld the necessary air permits. An EPA board ruled that Shell had not taken into account the greenhouse gas emissions of an icebreaking vessel needed to plow through the Chukchi Sea to clear the way for the drilling ships.
Significant areas off Alaska have been designated critical polar bear habitat, hampering drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. They are thought to contain 25 billion barrels of oil and 100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — America's second largest hydrocarbon reserves after the Gulf of Mexico.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced that the dunes sagebrush lizard, a 3-inch-long reptile native to the American Southwest, "faces immediate and significant threats due to oil and gas activities and herbicide treatments" and begun the process to have it listed it under the Endangered Species Act. That could severely limit, if not shut down, West Texas oil production.
Extending existing leases is not enough in this environment. The snail's-pace permitting process in the Gulf and elsewhere remains a de facto moratorium. If the president were truly serious about ramping up production, wouldn't he sign the bill the House passed on Thursday, the Reversing President Obama's Offshore Moratorium Act?
That bill that would require lease sales within five years for drilling in areas that were subject to Obama's seven-year moratorium on offshore drilling. The legislation sets a production goal of 3 million barrels of oil and 10 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day and estimates that 1.2 million jobs will be created around the country.
The only area where lease sales might be accelerated, according to the president, is the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, which was created by President Harding in 1923.
Why is this location acceptable, but not the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Both are home to caribou. Oil companies would prefer to drill in ANWR, that's why.
The Democrats are fond of saying we have just 2% of the world's oil yet consume 25% of it, a false claim repeated by Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin on Fox News Sunday. Leaving aside the fact that we produce 24% of the world's goods and services, the 2% supply figure includes reserves only where we are already drilling.
It does not include the 10 billion barrels locked up in ANWR or the 86 billion barrels locked up in the Outer Continental Shelf or the 800 billion barrels of oil held hostage in shale in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.
Obama says we can't drill our way out of our energy predicament soon.
Yes, we can.
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