Obama and oil

4/4/10

This is a note I sent Glenn Beck:

When I heard the radio broadcast on Wednesday morning of President Obama saying he was opening drilling for oil off the coast of Virginia I was thinking to myself, "He's finally doing something I'm wholeheartedly in agreement with. Maybe he's not trying to destroy the economy to drive us into Socialism after all." I was also thinking, "I hope this isn't another one of his smoke and mirrors promises." He has a habit of saying one thing and doing another. I would discover two days later that it truly was another one of Obama's acts of cunning.

Karl Rove, on Sean Hannity’s TV show Good Friday night, explained that in 2008 the United States Congress lifted the ban on offshore drilling off the East and West coasts and also Alaska. That agreement was repealed by the Obama administration. Karl Rove explained that what Obama did was act like he was expanding drilling but was actually narrowing the area that was opened in 2008 and he took Bristol Bay in Alaska out of the picture.

I've been exhorting the talk show commentators on radio and TV to get a drumbeat started to support drilling for oil ever since our foreign oil suppliers waged economic war on us in 2008 and gradually drove the price of their oil up to $147.00 a barrel. This was the real cause of why our economy and the whole world's was driven into the ground. Every household and every industry’s budget was affected when the price of a gallon of gas went to over four dollars and other energy costs skyrocketed. I can't understand why so little has been mentioned about it.

This country is awash with oil and natural gas. It defies common sense that we're not independent of foreign oil. We could have been filling up at the pump in 2008 for what gasoline cost in 1973 when we were paying 34 cents a gallon instead of paying over $4.00 because we were at the mercy of our foreign oil suppliers - and our economy wouldn't be in the state it's in today.

We send 700 billion dollars a year to other countries we’ve placed our dependence on for our oil needs when we have all we need right here. A program on the Biography channel last week showed that Rockefeller, in his heyday, in the last third of the 19th century had oil rigs in almost every state in the union. The Standard Oil Company, that he founded, was finally broken up by President Theodore Roosevelt and a number of other companies were formed. For those who want to demonize Rockefeller as one of the great "robber barons," and, of course, he was, there are other things they should keep in mind. While he became a multi-billionaire, he also gave ten percent of his income to charity and helped fill the government coffers with the revenues he generated. The building industry and economy in general also prospered. When our businessmen make money our government makes money.

Anyone interested can Google BAKKEN OIL FORMATION on the Internet and see the enormous hordes of oil that have been discovered in Montana and North Dakota. For people who are resistive to drilling for oil because of environmental concerns they must understand that, whether we like it or not, we are and will be dependent on oil for our energy needs for some time to come. We can use our own or make the Sheik of Araby rich using his. According to the most optimistic prognosticators that I’ve heard, we’re still decades away from when we’ll be able to place our reliance on solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy.

If environmentalists have a global interest in concerns about the environment, we have high-tech methods for going after our oil supplies while third world countries are not so careful. There’s a display on the Internet among the Bakken stories that shows how we use one oil rig to go after what’s underfoot as we send tentacles out underground like a giant octopus - and with horizontal drilling methods draw oil from distances as far as forty miles away. One oil rig takes the place of numerous rigs while people on the surface of the ground have no idea of what’s going on beneath them.

Not only could we draw down our national debt by being competitors selling oil to other countries on the world market but we’d be putting our own people to work. And when people work they pay taxes and their wealthy bosses become wealthier and they pay taxes. It’s been reported that the top three percent of earners pay 40% of the revenues that the government takes in.

It was reported by Brit Hume on Fox News during the week that the CBO has said that the national debt is now 12.6 trillion dollars and by 2020 it's expected to be 22 trillion. An illustration of what oil could do to draw down that debt was brought home by something that was said on an Ice Road Truckers program I was watching last summer. These are the truckers that traverse hazardous frozen mountain roads to bring equipment to an oil pumping station in northern Alaska. They said that the people of Alaska share in the revenues that are taken in by the state government and that in 2008 everyone in Alaska was given a check for $1000.

Our lack of independence for our oil needs also causes difficulties with our foreign affairs. The United States is currently trying to get China to go along with imposing sanctions on Iran to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran is one of China’s main suppliers of oil. We could be China’s supplier and draw down our debt to them by letting them have our oil at an attractive enough price that they’d want to be buying it from us. We could supplant Iran for being the one to provide for China’s oil needs.

If the current administration wants to get serious about getting the oil flowing, there are rigs in place right now off the coast of California that were deactivated in 1991 by President George Bush Senior when he declared a moratorium on drilling. They could be made operative in a matter of months. Not drilling for that oil is more of an environmental hazard than going for it. That oil oozes out of the ground into the coastal waters and contaminates the beaches.

Oil tankers come to our ports from all parts of the world. The Internet lists 15 of our largest suppliers. In December 2009 a tanker from Yemen, of all places, was being kept a safe distance out of Boston harbor until it was given security clearance. It was carrying liquid nitrogen gas. LNG must be kept at a temperature of almost 300 degrees below zero to keep it in a liquid state. If the tanker was to be punctured it's hard to tell how far the gas would spread.