2012 ENERGY INDEPENDENCE ACT
It is recognized that the United States of America is at a major crossroads in its history. The people are downtrodden: affordable housing is becoming less and less available; our educational institutions are suffering continuing funding crises; large groups of people remain unemployed. To address these issues, this 2012 ENERGY INDEPENDENCE ACT is now the law of the land. Its provisions are as follows:
1)The U.S. Government shall open the treasures of the oil shale reserves on a scheduled, lease basisa, beginning January 1, 2013. Leases will be auctioned to various oil companies who pledge to harvest the oils from these leases, and make these harvested oils available for use by the American people and its military.
2) As the products of these leases come online, the United States government will systematically reduce the amounts of oil and oil products to be imported into the United States, making these external sources of oil, that would otherwise be used by the people of the United States, to be available for use by other countries.
3) An oil severance tax shall be assessed against all oils harvested, said oil severance tax representing 15% of the value of the oil in its raw form at the point of extraction. This approach has previously been successful by individual states, such as the Commonwealth of Kentucky in assessing severance tax on mined coal.
4) The monies collected from this severance tax shall be expended as follows: 10% of the monies collected shall go to management and enforcement activities of the Federal government, to assure that safe and environmentally sound practices are used in the extraction, processing, and transport of the resultant oil and oil products; 20% of the monies collected shall go towards funding of private organizations for research towards responsible means of increasing the efficencies in the use of all oil products, the selection of such private organizations to be made on a competitive basis consisting of a formula based on two components, each having equal weight: the quality and probability of any new prcess being successful, and 2) the cost of researching such new process; the remaining 70%of the monies collected shall go towards funding the social programs previously authorized by Congress and signed into law by the President. None of these monies may be used to fund new social programs.
5) The Environmental Protection Agency shall be tasked with reviewing extraction methods to conform with environmentally sound methodologies, such methodologies to be determined as environmentally sound by an environmental oversight committee composed of: a single representative designated by a coalition of oil drilling companies; a single representative from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; a representative designated by the U.S. Senate; a representative designated by the U.S. House of Representatives; and last, a representative designated by a majority of the States comprising the United States. In any split decision, a simple majority rule will govern.
6)The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency shall be hereby prohibited from considering Carbon Dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and in conjunction with this, the establishment and/or maintaining of a carbon tax and/or establishing and/or maintaing a market carbon credits sahll be expressly prohibited.
I'm of the opinion that any Presidential or Congressional candidates that would espouse the responsible exploitation of these reserves would garner the votes for election this year.
It seems to me the only downside would be the opposition from the environmental contingencies out there - which, in my opinion, is not based on sound science.