The U.S. is Blocking Energy Wealth and Jobs
By Alan Caruba
What if I
told you that the government was blocking America’s prosperity in the form of
enormous untapped energy reserves that represent wealth and jobs that would
once again put America on the path to fiscal security and growth?
Recently,
Matt Vespa, on CNS.com reported that the International Energy Agency released a
report that said the United States has the capacity to outpace Saudi Arabia as
one of the world’s leading producers of oil. It projected that the U.S. could
become a net oil exporter around 2020. It could become entirely
self-sufficient.
Even so,
the Obama administration just moved to cordon off 1.6 million acres estimated
to represent one trillion barrels worth of oil in the name of conservation. At
the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to so encumber
hydraulic fracturing—fracking—with so many regulations it will thwart increased
use of this extraction technology that has been safely in use for decades.
As Dan Kish,
Senior Vice President for Policy at the Institute for Energy Research, warns,
there is a major government effort “to federalize hydraulic fracturing
regulation” which is already being done by states “in a very professional and
knowledgeable way. Take fracking away, the oil and gas production drops.”
For years,
through many administrations, the federal government has been doing everything
in its power to restrict drilling domestically and off-shore where billions of
barrels of oil remains untapped. In October, a Wall Street Journal editorial
noted that “The latest example is the Interior Department’s little-noticed
August decision to close off from drilling nearly half of the 23.5 million acre
National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.”
As far
back as 1976, Congress designated the Reserve a strategic oil and gas stockpile
to meet the “energy needs of the nation”, but oil and gas that is not extracted
meets no needs. It keeps the nation dependent on imported oil and gas. In an
August 22 letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar from the entire Alaska
delegation in Congress called it “the largest wholesale land withdrawal and
blocking of access to an energy resource by the federal government in decades.”
Noting
that “Most of the other 11.5 million acres are almost indistinguishable from
the acreage owned by the state that is being drilled safely nearby” the Journal
pointed out that drilling on privately owned land has seen North Dakota pass
Alaska as the second highest oil-producing state behind Texas.”
According
to the Congressional Research Service, “The federal government owns roughly
635-640 million acres of the land in the United States. Four agencies
administer 609 million acres of this land; the Forest Service in the Department
of Agriculture, and the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and
Fish and Wildlife Service, all in the Department of the Interior.” The Bureau
of Land Management manages 248 million acres and is responsible for 700 million
acres of subsurface mineral resources.
Mostly by
stealth, more and more privately owned land is being purchased by the federal
government. In September 2011, Audrey Hudson, writing for Human Events,
reported that “The Obama administration is spending $35 million to buy 30,000
acres of private property across the U.S. this year to make permanent homes for
mice, fairy shrimp, mussels, prairie bushes and beetles. Those are just some of
the 70 critters and plants to benefit from the land purchases in a dozen states
as part of the government’s habitat conservation plans for endangered species.”
Quoting
Rob Gordon of The Heritage Foundation, Hudson reported that “The federal
government already owns more land than Germany, France, the United Kingdom,
Spain, Italy, and Poland combined.” The Endangered Species Act is just an
excuse to secure ownership of more land and, in particular, to restrict
development of every description from housing to hospitals.
Instead of
a future in which our oil and gas reserves could unleash all manner of economic
growth and the generation of thousands of new jobs, Ben Wolfgang, reporting in
the November 22 edition of The Washington Times, “The drilling process that has
brought the U.S. energy independence within reach faces renewed scrutiny from
the Obama administration and an uncertain future in many states.”
“Next
month, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to release a draft of
its long-awaited report on suspected links between water pollution and
fracking, which uses huge amounts of water, combined with sand and chemical
mixtures, to crack underground rock and release trapped oil and gas.” Fracking,
however, occurs well below underground water levels and has been shown to have
no effect on it.
What we
are witnessing is the deliberate effort by the Obama administration, in concert
with earlier administrations, to deny the economic benefit of tapping the
nation’s vast reserves of oil and gas domestically and off-shore. This was
evident, as well, in the President’s decision about the XL Keystone pipeline on
the grounds that it threatened aquifers if allowed to proceed. Thousands of
jobs were lost in that single decision with no evidence of the truth of the
assertion.
As the
nation sinks further into economic decline and default, it is obvious that the
nation’s energy sector is being thwarted at a time when it holds the promise of
lifting it out of growing unemployment, higher energy costs, and the drumbeat
of utterly false environmental claims about greenhouse gas emissions.
© Alan
Caruba, 2012
****************************
Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" and shared on dozens
of news and opinion websites. His blog recently passed more than 2 million page views.
If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. For information on his professional
skills, Caruba Editorial Services is the place to go!
You can find Alan Caruba on both Facebook and Twitter as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment