Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Oil Prices Rise, Obama Does Nothing Despite New Field Find

Drudge has this link up today: Rising oil price threatens fragile recovery (sorry, the link is for subscribers only, although I was able to read it earlier). In this “water is wet” story, rising oil prices are ready to stymie the world’s economies by rising to unnecessarily high levels at a time when they should remain low.

Thank you, President Obama.

It goes without saying that this situation doesn’t need to happen. If we had an administration that was at all interested in lifting America out of the depths of the worst economy since the Great Depression, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now. We’d be doing the things that we all know should be done to get our economy going again.

What we have instead is an administration that seems intent upon prolonging America’s suffering. Based on their actions, they apparantly want high unemployment and people without jobs. The reason why is anyone’s guess. But the fact that this recession has gone on this long, longer than any other recovery on record, tells us something.

In fact, we’re not even in a recovery. Our current rate of growth is hovering around the 2.5% mark. While that's technically positive growth, economists say that this is barely enough to tread water. It needs to be around 9% to start to see any real positive effect. That is possible, but this administration seems to look at our economy much as a caveman would look at a car. It’s a wonder to behold, but it does so much more when you know how it works.

Take oil for example. If you’re in business, I don’t need to tell you what high fuel prices do to your bottom line. If you go to the grocery store, you see the effects of increased transportation costs in the form of higher prices. If you work and drive to get there, you know that when gas prices rise, you receive a cut in pay. When the cost of gasoline goes up, everyone pays for it.

The worst part of all this is that none of it needs to happen.

None of it.

Let that sink in for a moment.

By now, you should be intimately familiar with the negative effects on our nations's energy production from the Big Green Movement. Radical environmentalists, (there is no other kind) despite being unelected, have been dictating our energy policy for over a generation. These groups have blocked or slowed every effort to increase our nation’s energy supplies. Want to build a new oil refinery? Expect some fat-cat, left-wing environmental lawyer to beat you to the courthouse with a lawsuit to stop it. Want to build a new nuclear power plant to fill the needs of a growing community? Expect demonstrations against it led by more radical, left-wing environmental lawyers and their stooges. Drill for oil? You’ve got to be kidding. The Obama administrations position is that, despite a Federal court’s decision citing the unconstitutionality of it, there’s still a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, putting thousands of people out of work, further slowing any chance of recovery.

In other words, our own government is making sure that we never use traditional energy sources again. It’s their misguided idea that we’re supposed to be forced into some sort of “green economy.” There’s only one problem with that idea: it doesn’t work. Alternative energy has been studied for nearly forty years and has yet to become viable. The only way to force the country to use it is to shovel massive amounts of tax money into temporary government programs. Spain tried it and failed. For every “green job” their government created, 2.5 private sector jobs were lost.

In short, our own government, under the control of eco-freaks, has tied our hands when it comes to energy production. We could be drilling for our own oil. We should be building new refineries, since we haven’t built one since the ‘70’s.

And you do know that Global Warming was proven to be a hoax, don’t you? There is no reason for us not to be developing our own energy supplies. Not one.

Yet for years we’ve heard politicians in Washington say we need to become less dependent on foreign oil. Of course, their actions prove that they’re not serious when they say that, else we’d see less restrictions on oil drilling, not more moratoriums.

Two facts make it abundantly clear that this administration doesn’t want a recovery to occur. One is the financing of Petrobras to the tune of some $2B so they can expand their drilling operations. The other is that our own US Geological Service has discovered a major new crude oil field. In fact, this is the largest oil field they’ve ever discovered.

It’s in Montana.

Now, in a sane world, we’d already be pumping oil out of it, creating jobs and wealth, increasing the retirement portfolios of Americans who own oil company stock and generally acting for the general welfare of the country. The fact that we aren’t, and aren’t even planning to exploit this valuable natural resource speaks volumes about the current mindset in Washington.

We need energy, we have sources of energy, yet we aren’t developing our own resources of energy. No other country is doing what we’re doing to ourselves.

Does that seem like a sensible thing to do?

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