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Energy: As energy prices surge to uncomfortably high levels, a top administration official wants to make it harder for U.S. companies to get more oil and gas. Once again, we're shooting ourselves in the foot on energy.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar couldn't have picked a worse time to announce that he's placing new barriers on the development of oil and gas resources. Last year's rise in oil was the largest in a decade, and crude prices today have topped $82 a barrel.
Yet Salazar on Wednesday announced plans, as the energy news service Greenwire put it, that "will require more detailed environmental reviews, more public input and less use of a provision to streamline leasing."
In short, private energy development efforts are going backward.
Worse, Salazar has politicized energy to an unseemly degree. In unveiling his new plans and trying to lay blame somewhere else for recent energy price jumps, he said: "The previous administration's 'anywhere, anyhow' policy on oil and gas development ran afoul of communities, carved up the landscape and fueled costly conflicts that created uncertainty for investors and industry."
This isn't the first time Salazar's turned our energy future into a political debate. In November, he lashed out at the oil and gas industry, accusing it of "behaving like an arm" of the Republican Party and decrying the industry's "untruths."
"Trade groups need to understand that they do not own the nation's public lands," he said.
He's right. They don't own it. We do. And because of Salazar's unwise and even hostile energy stewardship, we will likely suffer through years and years of higher prices for crude oil, natural gas and other badly needed resources.
As the chart shows, oil jumped from $44 a barrel at the start of 2009 to $83 a barrel at Wednesday's close. It's no accident.
Salazar's latest move partly reverses the clear intent of a 2005 law, passed by a Republican Congress, that would speed up and streamline permits for energy projects on public lands. In effect he's pawning our energy future to political expediency.
The U.S. is sitting on an immense supply of oil and gas, probably larger than anywhere else in the world. We have at least 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore. As much as 35 billion barrels of oil lies waiting to be tapped in Alaska and the Chukchi Sea. A massive 2.2 trillion barrels of energy lies in our oil shale deposits in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.
Election 2010: The back-to-back Senate retirements of Byron Dorgan and Chris Dodd may be just the beginning. The people have seen the future of health care reform and found it doesn't work. Apres moi, le deluge. We don't know what the Mayan calendar says about 2010, but it's starting to look ...
Iran: Words are as important in the art of diplomacy as materials are in the building of a house. Our chief diplomatic voice has now told Tehran that America's words have no structural integrity. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday claimed, with regard to the growing nuclear weapons ...
Terrorism: Cuba has protested its place on the U.S. list of terror-prone nations slated for extra airport screening. But a look at the country's record as a state sponsor of terror proves that its placement is well-earned. On Tuesday, Cuba blasted the U.S. for including it on a list of 14 ...
War On Terror: Homeland Security, we are learning in alarming ways, is a mess. It can't do its job and even has a policy for letting known terrorists board jetliners. We need a government that will fight for us. The inspector general for Homeland Security found that the department's National ...
Meet the Beltway bloodsuckers. They convene in the dead of night, when most ordinary mortals have left work and let their guard down or are lying asleep in bed. Pale-faced and insatiable, the nocturnal thieves do their nefarious business in backrooms and secret chambers. Their primary victims? ...
Posted By: acierno(300) on 1/7/2010 | 6:07 AM ET
the only change we will be gauranteed will be a lower standard of living and more reliance on the thugs of the world.
Posted By: Brownknows(1010) on 1/7/2010 | 5:42 AM ET
Salazar; "will require more detailed environmental reviews, more public input and less use of a provision to streamline leasing." MORE? Let's Hope he is lying and will Change. You want revolt in this country with 17 million un/under employed? Rising gas prices, rising food prices, ram illegitimate HC Reform down Americans throats, & keep up CO2 fraud with CnT, poof goes recovery. All by design, intentional misery. Dems better do more than resign, better hide. How much more will we take?
Posted By: bill sekerak(70) on 1/7/2010 | 1:56 AM ET
If these crackpots continue down this road in an attempt to control the economy ( and thus American citizens ) soon there will be no economy of consequence to control. All this points to an American elite whose motivation is the impoverishment of the middle class that is easy to control with druidic prophecies from our new state religion ie. environmentalism.
Posted By: Serfdumb(330) on 1/6/2010 | 11:57 PM ET
The far left Dems don't want their energy resources turned into profits for greedy capitalists, besides when they get through 'fundamentally transforming America' the ivory tower elites can better distribute the energy & profits in a socially responsible way (thru bureacracies, kickbacks and graft - the Chicago Way but with a Marxist / Leninist twist). Until then, all non state-controlled industrial expansion needs to be squashed. W/HCare, cap & tax, amnesty - transformation is guaranteed.
Posted By: zenga(785) on 1/6/2010 | 10:37 PM ET
someone needs to figure out how the Dems plan to profit by preventing the US from accessing these resources. cause sure as the sun will rise tomorrow morning, they are somehow profiting, BIG, from keeping all our resources from being utilized. just disgusting.
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