It’s aggravating to me to see that whereas we are all paying outrageous amounts of money for gasoline and demanding something be done, all we get out of Congress are puny efforts with no real substance. Instead of demanding new wells be dug, new refinieries be built and new nuclear plants be constructed we get nonsense like Nancy Pelosi wanting to sue OPEC or a “tax holiday” over the summer (which has two things going against it: 1. there’s no way to verify we are actually paying 47 cents less at the pump and 2. if it ran for three months where the average American drove 250 miles a week at 20 MPG consuming 12.5 gallons, they’d save a WHOPPING 28 DOLLARS!! — based on federal taxes of 18.4 cents per gallon)
We have Congress dragging their heels, afraid to piss off the enviro-freaks and the leftist America-hating Democrat supporters.
Here’s a handy chart of what could happen if REAL republicans were in Congress:
PowerLine Blog also adds this:
Methodology: Retail gasoline prices are the result of literally hundreds of factors including crude oil supply, global demand, refinery capacity, regulation, taxes, weather, the value of the dollar, etc. Therefore it is impossible to say with certainty what one individual action will do to the overall price. However, based on what we know about the impact of crude oil supply and prices it is possible to develop some potential ranges of impact on gasoline prices for certain policy changes. For example, using the methodology employed by Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats that suspending shipments into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (between 40-77,000 barrels of oil a day) would reduce gas prices by at least 5 cents, bringing ANWR online (at least one million barrels of oil a day) could impact gasoline prices by between 70 cents and $1.60.
Meanwhile, Senator Norm Coleman is making no friends with his thoughts on this matter. he delivered a speech on the Senate Floor saying he had 2 ways to help America get energy independent:
Increased Domestic Drilling
With an estimated 2.8 million barrels of oil and 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas sitting under the Outer Continental Shelf, Senator Coleman feels it is essential that we tap this unused resource. As a way to lower oil prices. Unlike Democrats like Al Franken, Senator Coleman knows that with an ever-increasing demand for oil, the only way to see a decrease in the price-per-barrel is to increase the supply. This has the potential to offset foreign oil imports by as much as $145 billion dollars. This bill would give governors of affected coastal states a say in the matter and would allow them to negotiate deals that are in the best interests of their citizens.
Investing In More Nuclear Energy
As Senator Coleman is fond of saying, the French are not braver than we are when it comes to investing in nuclear. Senator Colemans legislation would implement a tax credit and loan guarantee system for nuclear production as well as training for an expanded nuclear workforce. And, he has been a strong advocate for lifting Minnesotas moratorium on expanding nuclear power.
If passed, this legislation would go a long to help bring energy prices down and go a long way in securing our energy independence.
I wonder if John McCain was paying attention?
Newt Gingrich also has some ideas:
Not sure I am totally convinced about releasing strategic reserves lowering the price per barrel as we;d have to replenish those reserves eventually. But we need more people saying stuff like this.
When it comes to drilling for oil in ANWR (remember, we’re talking about an area that is 19 million acres, of which 17.5 million is totally off limits and only 2200 acres is proposed for drilling) the left likes to trot out their mantra about how it would destroy their pristine beauty that is ANWR.
They love trotting out pictures like these:
when in reality, the area proposed for drilling looks like this:
Back in 2004 Bill Hobbs wrote this about ANWR:
Alaska Governor Frank H. Murkowski announced yesterday that the state will open for oil drilling certain areas off the coast of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. The state has sovereign authority for off-shore development, just as Texas and Louisiana are doing today.
From the governor’s statement:
The new areas to be offered for lease, exploration, and development are 670,000 acres of land off the coast of the NPR-A and more than 350,000 acres off the coast of ANWR. Toward that end, I have directed my Commissioner of Natural Resources, Tom Irwin, to open an immediate dialog with the residents of the North Slope. While the US House and Senate remain grid-locked over opening ANWR for oil development, I am not burdened with that process.
Residents of Alaska and the North Slope are unified in their support for the opening of ANWR. Initial contacts with officials of the North Slope have been made. It would be my intention to include the state offshore ANWR tracts in our October 2004 Beaufort Sea Area Wide lease sale.
America should not be held hostage by Middle-East oil imports. Motorists should not have to pay more than $2 for a gallon of gasoline. Alaska oil, Alaska natural gas, can help balance the equation.
The plan will even allow for “directional drilling” into the so-called “1002 area,” the tiny area of ANWR that the Bush administration has sought unsuccessfully to open to oil exploration. Efforts to open a small part of ANWR’s frozen, muddy, barren coastal plain have been blocked by an extremist environmentalist agenda backed by too many people in Congress, most of them Democrats. Sen. John Kerry is one of them. He wants to raise taxes on gasoline by 50 cents a gallon, costing the average American family more than $600 more per year in taxes, while preventing domestic oil production that might help reduce the price of oil and create jobs. Even though drilling in ANWR would impact only about 2,000 of ANWR’s 19 million acres. But I digress.
The 1002 area could produce up to 1.6 million barrels of oil per day. Directional drilling from the off-shore leases will allow oil companies to drill horizontally into the 1002 area and get at that oil.
That was four years ago. So far? Nothing!
Meanwhile, acting like a democrat, John McCain also came out saying he’s against drilling in ANWR. Jonah Goldberg takes him to task:
Sen. John McCain said this week he would not drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the same reason he “would not drill in the Grand Canyon … I believe this area should be kept pristine.”
Pristine means unspoiled, virginal, in an original state.
One wonders how pristine the Grand Canyon can be if it has roughly 5 million visitors every year, rafting, hiking, picnicking and riding mules up one side and down the other. Campfires, RVs and motels that do not conjure the word “virginal” ring around large swaths of it.
This isn’t to say that the Grand Canyon isn’t a beautiful place; it inspires awe among those who visit it. ANWR (pronounced”AN-wahr) inspires awe almost entirely in those who haven’t been there. It is an environmental Brigadoon or Shangri-La, a fabled land almost no one will ever see. That is its appeal. People like the idea that there are still Edens “out there” even if they will never, ever see them.
Indeed, if Americans could visit the north coast of Alaska, as I have, as easily as they can visit the Grand Canyon, the oil would be flowing by now.
Amplifying what Hobbs wrote back in 2004, he goes on:
Most of the images of the proposed drilling area that people see on the evening news are misleading precisely because they tend to show the glorious parts of ANWR, even though that’s not where the drilling would take place. Even when they position their cameras in the right location, producers tend to point them in the wrong direction. They point them south, toward the Brooks mountain range, rather than north, across the coastal plain where the drilling would be.
In summer, the coastal plain is mostly mosquito-plagued tundra and bogs. (The roughnecks at Prudhoe Bay joke that “life begins at 40″ – because at 40 degrees, clouds of mosquitoes and other pests take flight from the ocean of puddles). In the winter, it reaches 70 degrees below zero (not counting wind chill, which brings it to 120 below) and is in round-the-clock darkness.
A few years back, Jimmy Carter wrote of proposed drilling in ANWR in the New York Times: “The roar alone – of road-building, trucks, drilling and generators – would pollute the wild music of the Arctic and be as out of place there as it would be in the heart of Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon.”
The roads are made from ice, hence constructed in winter, doing no permanent damage to the environment. As for the discordant notes such activity would introduce to the Arctic symphony, I don’t know whether a falling tree makes a sound if no one is there to hear it, but I suspect that the “wild music” of the Arctic in winter is only euphonious to those – like Carter – who are not actually there to hear it.
Even in summer, people who actually live on the north coast of Alaska, like the residents of Kaktovik (just three miles north of the coastal plain where drilling might take place) overwhelmingly think good jobs in their backyard is music to their ears.
McCain is an asshole. Simple as that.
