Posted on 10/15/2012 10:18:57 AM PDT by Snuph
President Obama is campaigning as a champion of the oil and gas boom he's had nothing to do with, and even as his regulators try to stifle it. 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.
The area is called the National Petroleum Reserve because in 1976 Congress designated it as a strategic oil and natural gas stockpile to meet the "energy needs of the nation." Alaska favors exploration in nearly the entire reserve. The feds had been reviewing four potential development plans, and the state of Alaska had strongly objected to the most restrictive of the four. Sure enough, that was the plan Interior chose.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says his plan "will help the industry bring energy safely to market from this remote location, while also protecting wildlife and subsistence rights of Alaska Natives." He added that the proposal will expand "safe and responsible oil and gas development, and builds on our efforts to help companies develop the infrastructure that's needed to bring supplies online."
The problem is almost no one in the energy industry and few in Alaska agree with him. In an August 22 letter to Mr. Salazar, the entire Alaska delegation in Congress—Senators Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski and Representative Don Young—call it "the largest wholesale land withdrawal and blocking of access to an energy resource by the federal government in decades." This decision, they add, "will cause serious harm to the economy and energy security of the United States, as well as to the state of Alaska." Mr. Begich is a Democrat.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Reverse this order in January...
The federal government has entirely too much power. What happened to the “balance of power” and states’ rights?
January,,
11.5 million acres. That’s over a third of the entire state of Pennsylvania! PA = 29.4 million acres!
Begich(d) MUST GO and so does Lisa Moosecowsky(r) in the next Senatorial election for Alaska..
They both are malefactors.. and enemies to America..
Obama is trying bribe his green voters in WA and Oregon, whom he betrayed by pushing the sub-bituminous coal terminals in WA and Oregon. The Green voters are irate because Obama is putting so much political pressure on all the Democrat candidates that the Greens are being forced to vote against their own best interests. The coal terminals will turn the beautiful northwest coast line into an industrial wasteland.
These same Greens are also very anti-oil and gas, especially in Alaska. Alaska is, after all, part of the Pacific Northwest.
“The coal terminals will turn the beautiful northwest coast line into an industrial wasteland.”
How would they do that?
Reverse it and then give the land to the state of Alaska.
No, that's only for appearances. Zero is paying off Treasury bond-holders with green dollars in lieu of inflation. The "weightier" of these folks just so happen to be owners of the oil companies, dollars they then funnel to green activists through their tax-exempt "charitable" foundations. High prices create profits that do not require risky investments.
Else, please explain why anybody would be buying our debt.
This oil is reserved as collatoral for USA’s massive debt. All the environmental cover story cannot hide it from all of us. Duh.
Have you ever seen a coal terminal? Have you ever taken a look at the areas along a coal train route? I am not talking about a few trains per day. I am talking about trains running all day long. Dirty, noisy, and congestion causing.
WA coasts are not all urban areas. Much of the coast line is high end residential, and park land. The trains in my county would cut off public access to the parks and decrease access to the water front. This would kill off the salmon fishing and threaten the whale population as well as potentially polluting the water with foreign invasive species of bacteria, plants and shell fish from the ballast water.
I could go on and on but you can get informed by watching the film that was put out by the WA public TV channel, “Coal at the Crossroads”.
http://capitolrecord.tvw.org/coal-crossroads/#.UHxgMo6Je-Q
I don’t understand any of that. Please explain it a little more, so that an economics challenged person can understand.
One of the excuses that Obama has given for the pressure for the coal terminal is that he sees it as a way to pay off the US debt to the Chinese. I don’t understand that, either, but that was part of the explanation that I was given by the local head of the Sierra club, when I asked why Maria Cantwell had taken such an active part in pushing the coal terminal and why the governor and all the federal Democrat politicians were pushing so hard to get this coal project through. They are doing it under pressure from Obama.
Now, that I can understand. It sounds dangerously possible.
Yes I’ve been around coal trains before and you are overstating what they do by a factor of 100 or so.
“This oil is reserved as collatoral for USA’s massive debt”
nonsense
The arabs are bribing our politicians to keep America dependent on foreign oil.
covered him with tar and feathers.
I have written extensively on this topic. So I'll ask that you read this before extending your questions.
Re the debt: Now, that I can understand. It sounds dangerously possible.
Both are aspects of the same thesis. The HOLDERS of the debt are the bond buyers. Why would anybody buy a nearly zero interest rate bond when Bernanke is inflating the currency? It is because the bidders for those bonds demand regulatory sweeteners before they'll buy. The more assets the government controls, they more sweeteners they have to sell. Hence, they are using those public stocks to inflate the asset value of their private holdings now in production, thus making a profit without having to pay for a drill, pipe, refinery capacity, anything. For those holding the government by the short and curlies, socialism and government debt are a very good deal.
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