Now that everyone’s bellyaching about $135/barrel oil (or whatever record-high price it reaches today), let’s review how we got here:
- No new oil refineries in decades
- No nuclear power plants built in the USA since the 1960s
- Severely restrict drilling and exploitation of our own oil resources, while the Chinese drink our milkshake off Florida
The US government is limiting access to our own resources, as Shell’s John Hofmeister explained
According to the Department of the Interior, 62 percent of all on-shore federal lands are off limits to oil and gas developments, with restrictions applying to 92 percent of all federal lands. We have an outer continental shelf moratorium on the Atlantic Ocean, an outer continental shelf moratorium on the Pacific Ocean, an outer continental shelf moratorium on the eastern Gulf of Mexico, congressional bans on on-shore oil and gas activities in specific areas of the Rockies and Alaska, and even a congressional ban on doing an analysis of the resource potential for oil and gas in the Atlantic, Pacific and eastern Gulf of Mexico.
The Democrat’s response: they want Hofmeister to guarantee that prices will not go up again. Top that one with Maxine Water’s proposal to nationalize (she couldn’t get herself to utter “nationalize”, so she stumbled with “socialize”) the oil companies. Here’s the video.
Up to now, it was absolutely inconceivable to me that a sitting representative would actually threaten – forget about suggesting – to nationalize a whole sector of private industry.
The Democrats are unable to understand that they are handing our own national security over to terror-supporting nations that produce oil; not only by guaranteeing a constant flow of dollars to them, but by granting them the power to manipulate the American economy.
I totally agree with Kim at Wizbang,
Now, if the US government and the Democrats like Ms. Waters were truly interested in erasing the oil companies’ record profits and helping the American consumers, then they would be doing everything they could to increase oil and gasoline production so as to saturate the market. The price of oil and gasoline would then drop through the floor. Remember when oil was $8 a barrel and gasoline was a mere $.95? Oil companies were merging left and right because they couldn’t stay in business on their own and the price of gas wasn’t on the American people’s radar. If punishing the oil companies is truly what Democrats like Maxine Waters really want to do, then they would glut the market. They would change the law so that the supply of oil and gasoline vastly outpaced demand and oil and gas prices dropped.
In all their self-serving grandiosity the Democrats want the price oil to continue to rise since it will bring about chaos to a Republican administration.
Socialism has failed everywhere, but to the Dems, if it brings them to power, they are willing to drive us to ruin. The bottom line is this: the more dependent we become on government the less prosperity we will ever enjoy.
As long as they steer the ship of state, expect oil to reach $300/barrel in the future.
UPDATE
… to be left-liberal and Left these days, you have to be ignorant of economics.
More on Maxine via Obi’s sister>
I just followed the PJM link to a piece on algae oil production. My biologist husband was impressed. I am convinced that there are lots of technological ideas that will lead to clean, sustainable energy independence. It will go faster if the idiots don’t bankrupt the country first and if they give the innovators the free room they need. What we don’t need is a Maxine Waters sticking her nose into things.
BTW, My husband’s comment was “Those Americans!”
expat
Subpoena those travel vouchers! I’ll betcha a dollar she’s been down south sipping tea with Mr.WatchMeSeizeTheOilCompanies and wearing her Red Hat. Where else could she have gotten the idea? The Dems haven’t had an original thought for a couple of decades now!
More on Maxine Waters at RedState.
But considering the cost of oil in Euros has tripled but in dollars it is up fivefold then perhaps Congress and the Executive Branch ought to fix the currency before “helping” the oil industry.