Gas right now, for those of us in flyovercountry is, for all intents and purposes $4 per gallon. The general belief is that it will soon be $5. This really should not shock anyone, as one of Barak Obama’s campaign promises to the SEIU, Acorn, AFSCME, and the coalition of the smug, (the ecofascists,) was that he would do exactly that to gas prices. You may not have known this, as our alphabet media sources made the decision for us all that this part of Obama’s message was not really all that important for us to know. Now that gas prices are that high, and it is clear that America is feeling the pain, Obama has taken to the airways to fix blame, anybody but him. Oil company executives are getting the blame this time around. He is talking about record profits, and the supposed subsidies that they receive. Let me disabuse you of this nonsense first.
The Oil companies have not reported their earnings yet for this quarter. How on Earth can Obama, or any politician for that matter know what the profits are, let alone whether they are at record levels. Dissemination of that particular information, of any publicly traded company, prior to being released to the general public as a whole is in fact against the law. So, if President Obama is privy to that knowledge and has made the decision to announce that prior than the boards of those companies, he has violated the insider trading laws and should be impeached for such.
Next, how did profit become a dirty word in America? In a free market system, such as ours used to be, and I hope will be again, profit and loss are equally important. When a company reports a profit, it is a measure not only of how wealthy the shareholders have become, but also of the value they have provided for the community at large. Oil companies produce a product. That product has proven to be so useful to the rest of us, that its usage has become literally a part of every aspect of our society. Oil companies did not trick us into making this situation, we found these uses for ourselves. Now that we are able to use it for making every aspect of our daily lives more convenient and comfortable, many have come to believe that it should be a basic right, akin to a free press and the right to bear arms. That oil company profits are big, is an indication that they have done a good job in supplying us with their valuable product with not a single interruption of supply, and in a manner which has also been convenient.
Subsidies, this is a specious argument at best. The fact is that oil is a product that has become so popular, the government has not only seen fit to tax the income of companies who produce it, but also levy an invisible extra tax at each location where it is dispensed. Not only the federal government is in on this, state and local governments have figured it out as well. The net flow of cash between oil companies and the various government entities are flowing more to the government than the other way around, I can assure you. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe the government should be subsidizing any business, but claiming that allowing Oil companies to take tax deductions is a subsidy is just plain dishonest. Most especially since they are actually paying a tax beyond their share of corporate taxation rates.
While green technologies are not like unicorns in the sense that they really don’t exist, they are every bit as useful right now. That does not mean that we should shut down all research and development of Solar, Wind, Hydro Electric, Nuclear, etc. On the contrary, keep going. But shutting down Oil and saying we will use a form of energy which honestly will not be able to do the job necessary is just plain stupidity. Edicting that in 10 years time, we will be operating our nation on 20% green sources can only have a limited amount of effects, not one of them good. We will be forced to cut our overall energy usage, which will create a real hardship for many Americans, the poorest among us will be hit the hardest. These technologies have been around for a very long time, and have not been developed to date not because of a lack of government intervention, but because that even with the full weight of the government behind them and against oil, oil is still more efficient, and in fact a vastly superior product.
So, besides demonizing big oil, or the patsy of the month, what else is President Obama and his team of academicians doing to help out?
Here is what the Obama Administration is really doing to help Americans with their pain at the pump.
Shell Oil Company has announced it must scrap efforts to drill for oil this summer in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska. The decision comes following a ruling by the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board to withhold critical air permits. The move has angered some in Congress and triggered a flurry of legislation aimed at stripping the EPA of its oil drilling oversight.
Shell has spent five years and nearly $4 billion dollars on plans to explore for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. The leases alone cost $2.2 billion. Shell Vice President Pete Slaiby says obtaining similar air permits for a drilling operation in the Gulf of Mexico would take about 45 days. He’s especially frustrated over the appeal board’s suggestion that the Arctic drill would somehow be hazardous for the people who live in the area. “We think the issues were really not major,” Slaiby said, “and clearly not impactful
The closest village to where Shell proposed to drill is Kaktovik, Alaska. It is one of the most remote places in the United States. According to the latest census, the population is 245 and nearly all of the residents are Alaska natives. The village, which is 1 square mile, sits right along the shores of the Beaufort Sea, 70 miles away from the proposed off-shore drill site.
The EPA’s appeals board ruled that Shell had not taken into consideration emissions from an ice-breaking vessel when calculating overall greenhouse gas emissions from the project. Environmental groups were thrilled by the ruling.
Barak Obama is banking on the fact that for the most part, our media are not only biased, but willing to lie to us as well. Why shouldn’t he? They were very willing to do just that throughout the 2008 campaign and the first 29 months of his Presidency. An example of one network not in his pocket, and they are continuously vilified for it. All we relly need to combat the goofy arguments of the left are the glimmerings of an adult memory.
