One of the most maddening, and asinine arguments I hear with regularity from the political left is that, “we can not drill our way out of our energy problems.” This foolishness is then added to with the further ridiculous statement that even if we started drilling today, it would not benefit us for at least a decade.
Let’s start off by shagging the pop fly first. The argument that drilling now won’t help now, but would take a decade to help will be easy to refute on several grounds. First, so what? Something useful taking a long time to start working sounds to me like a reason to get started sooner rather than later. If only we had started developing our own sources of oil a decade ago, rather than waiting for today, we wouldn’t be in this mess. What if we had started to develop our full energy producing potential back on the very day we made the horrible mistake of establishing a Department of Energy, which was supposed to prevent this energy crisis from ever happening again? The point is, refusing to drill simply because the perception is that drilling won’t produce enough oil quickly enough, ignores the fact completely that we will also be facing the same energy problems in the future as well. No matter how much we want the green energy fairies to produce magical sources of energy using pixie dust and magic wands, oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear fuel remain the only reliable sources of energy currently. Even with massive government waste, endless educational propaganda, and fraudulent accounting techniques, the green energy fairies have failed to produce any actual success.
Next, let’s take a look at the actual results of prior actions. During the crisis of 2008, as soon as President Bush announced that he would end the Presidential ban on new exploration and that he would increase the land available for federal lease to oil companies, the world price per barrel fell. As a matter of fact, each and every time we here in the United States made any kind of official sounding noise pointing to an increase in our own production, the world price per barrel fell. In the summer of 2008, gas was pegged at $4 per gallon for most of the country. When Bush left office in January of 2009, we Americans were paying $1.87 per gallon. It is not so difficult to understand the economic and political reasons for this that we need Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams to explain it to us. When our good friends at OPEC,(sarcasm,) caught wind of the fact that we might produce more oil, they increased their own production immediately. They produced an amount of oil sufficient to lower the world price to make our production not as cost efficient as when gas was $4.00 per gallon. The free markets produced a solution which 4 decades of central planning was unable to produce. For 50 plus years, we have seen repeatedly, that the members of OPEC are eager to cheat one another when market conditions dictate that it is in their best interests to do so.
If in fact the economic truths of supply and demand do not exist, as the Democrats are want to preach to us, why the release of the SPR as announced by President Obama? (a maneuver by the way for which he should be impeached. We’ll discuss this in the next paragraph.) If it were true that we could not lower the price we pay at the pump by increasing the supply, why open the SPR? Why not just continue down the same road of regulating our own production down to zero and allowing foreign producers to continue to dictate unilaterally what our price would be, and how much we would be allowed to purchase. In 2006, when Democrats gained control of the House and Senate, and they announced that their top two priorities would be to create jobs, and to end our dependence on foreign oil, did you believe that it would result in $4.00 per gallon gasoline and a 9.8% unemployment number? If they had stated that their plan to end our dependence on foreign oil would include punishing us for driving at all, no one would have bought that. Ending our dependence on foreign oil should mean that we wish to produce our own considerable energy needs here at home, something which many of us feel is within our national capability. Even if it is not, we can only help ourselves out by working towards this goal.
As promised, the Barack Obama dedicated paragraph. If you were going to try to destroy America, would you do anything differently than what Barack Obama has done during his Presidency? Release of the SPR, while simultaneously instituting a regulatory environment which could only be described as an all out war on the oil and gas industry is irresponsible for a few reasons. It is criminally so. One, it lowers the amount of oil available to us should an actual crisis occur. Even though his release only represents 4.13% of the SPR, it still represents 30 Million barrels less that we would have available to us in case of a crisis. Two, by not allowing us to produce our own, he is merely trying to hide the problem for a later date. This will do nothing to solve our energy problem, it will only temporarily hide the symptoms until after he stands for reelection. This is a dishonest and potentially criminal move on the part of our President.
In January of 2009, B. Hussein Obama placed his hand on a Bible and swore to defend the Constitution and the United States of America. This cynical maneuver is an affront to that promise. This is not a crisis involving the disruption of oil supply, it is a political ploy to help with Obama’s electoral chances. Richard Nixon was run out of town for using his political might as Chief Executive to sway a Presidential election, and justifiably so. The difference between the two Presidents of course is that Richard Nixon did not endanger the well being of a single American in doing so. The same can not be said of Barack Obama. Between this, operation Fast and Furious, and Pigford, Barack Obama should be incarcerated, and not let out for a very long time.
Crossposted at Musings of a Mad Conservative.
