|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
National NewsConservative News
Cussin' At The Pump Won't Fix The Problem
Posted on: June 30, 2008
Cussin’ at the Pump Won’t Fix the Problem
By Gary Palmer
June 27, 2008
All across America, family budgets are being busted because some Democrats and Republicans have embraced a socialistic environmental agenda at great cost to American workers, businesses and families, especially lower-income families. These days, each gas station and each grocery store receipt shows American citizens how much they are paying for politicians who sold out to radical environmentalists and liberal social engineers. That’s the cost of bad political leadership.
How so? Since the 1970s, liberal politicians in Congress have passed laws that have locked up most of our oil reserves, stopped the construction of refineries and virtually banned the building of nuclear power plants. Every time we buy food, pump fuel or pay a natural gas or electric bill, we pay a price for these foolish policy decisions.
At the center of the fuel and food cost crisis is the price-per-barrel for crude oil. It has skyrocketed to $140 a barrel, primarily because the supply has not kept up with the demand. Even liberals such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, New York’s other liberal senator, understand that supply impacts price.
Speaking on the floor of the Senate on May 13, 2008, Schumer proclaimed that Saudi Arabia “holds the key to reducing gasoline prices at home in the short term.” His solution: block arms sales to the Saudis unless they “increase oil production by one million barrels per day” which he said would cut the price of gasoline by “50 cents per gallon almost immediately.”
While the majority of Americans whole-heartedly support an increase in the amount of oil being pumped in Saudi Arabia, the question people ought to ask: why don’t we pump our own oil? Instead of sending hundreds of billions of dollars to other countries, most of whom hate America, why not put those hundreds of billions of dollars back into our own economy?
The simple answer is that we can’t. Failed energy policies of the past imposed on us by politicians like Schumer and other liberal Democrats and Republicans in Congress have put most of our oil and other natural resources off-limits.
For instance, liberals in Congress have repeatedly rejected legislation that would allow drilling for oil in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) where there is an estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil. In 1995, the Republican-led Congress approved legislation to allow drilling in ANWR but President Bill Clinton vetoed it. Opponents argued that it would be ten years before oil from ANWR was available to the market. Instead of increasing the supply of oil, they argued for investing in clean fuel technology that would be on the market by the time oil from ANWR was available.
That was 13 years ago. Ironically, opponents of drilling in ANWR are still making the same arguments today. One million barrels a day could be flowing into the U.S. from ANWR right now if Clinton had not vetoed the legislation. Instead of providing our own oil and putting the money back into our own economy, we buy oil from hostile nations at inflated prices, putting billions of our dollars into their treasuries. At the current price of oil, Americans will have transferred over $500 billion to these nations by the end of 2008, which is more than we spend on our defense budget.
Liberals in Congress have also cut off access to 85 percent of the vast oil and natural gas reserves of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) which contains an estimated 86 billion barrels of oil. They have banned the recovery of an estimated eight billion to one trillion barrels of recoverable oil from the oil shale in the Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.
In addition, the Bureau of Land Management estimates that there are 53 billion barrels of oil on federal lands. But, sixty percent of this land cannot be leased at all and another 23 percent can be leased but oil and gas exploration and development is prohibited or limited in some cases to only a certain time of the year.
It is not just our ability to access our own oil reserves that the liberals in Congress have blocked. They also block building the refineries necessary to convert crude oil into the products we need. We haven’t built a new refinery in the United States since the global cooling hysteria days of the 1970s, specifically 1976.
Solutions proposed by the current Democrat majority in Congress range from imposing windfall profits tax on oil companies to nationalizing all U.S. refineries. Speaking of failed policies of the past -- in 1980, Congress tried a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Even Congress realized their huge mistake and repealed it six years later. And the idea of nationalizing our oil refineries serves as another reminder that the failed economic philosophies of Communism have not been totally discredited, at least not with some members of Congress.
Most of our pain is self-inflicted. In other words, our pain at the pump is a direct consequence of failed policies that deny access to our own energy resources which were imposed on us by some politicians, both Democrats and Republicans that we elected to Congress.
Americans can cuss Congress while they pump their paychecks into their gas tanks, but as long as they keep sending these same liberal politicians back to Congress, they should direct some of the tirade toward themselves.
Gary Palmer is president of the Alabama Policy Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research and education organization dedicated to the preservation of free markets, limited government and strong families, which are indispensable to a prosperous society.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
| |
|
