Free Republic

Energy Policy: Canada's prime minister restates that if there's no Keystone XL pipeline in the works, not to worry. Our northern ally will still be our friend as it sends its tar sands oil to Asian markets. 'I am very serious about selling our oil off this continent, selling our energy products off to Asia. I think we have to do that," Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a Monday interview with Canada's CTV National News. It was the latest warning from our impatient northern neighbor that has used its energy resources to advance job creation and growth and...

Energy: After admitting there's no documented evidence of groundwater contamination due to a technique used to extract oil and gas from shale, the EPA tries to manufacture a crisis in Wyoming. At a House Oversight Committee hearing in May, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson confirmed that, despite fears that hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as "fracking," would lead to contamination of ground water, there was no independently documented instances that it had occurred. Jackson told the committee: "I'm not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water." Suddenly the liberal group Pro Publica is...

Jobs: The president says that extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut will create more jobs than an oil pipeline from Canada. There are at least 20,000 members of the 99% who would disagree. You can see why the economy is in trouble. Vice President Joe Biden, the stimulus sheriff, says he turned first to MF Global's Jon Corzine for economic advice and President Obama thinks 20,000 people getting extended unemployment benefits does more for the economy than 20,000 people getting paychecks to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. In the president's view, extending the payroll tax cuts...

New Energy: The latest salvo in the administration's war on energy may be new rules and permits to regulate a process to get oil and gas from porous rock, sacrificing jobs and economic growth while under review. There are a few areas of the U.S. that are booming. Two of these are in North Dakota and Pennsylvania, states that sit atop two massive shale rock formations, the Bakken and the Marcellus. Extraction of oil and natural gas from these formations have created jobs and economic growth in the midst of a stagnant and parched economy. The oil and gas is...

Energy Policy: The same administration that says we can and should get oil from the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska is blocking a bridge needed to get it to market on environmental grounds. In his May 14 weekly radio address, President Obama called for annual lease sales in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA), not necessarily out of any conviction that increased domestic energy supply is good for prices and national security, but basically to perpetuate the myth that the oil companies refuse to drill in leased or leasable areas. While he restricts oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and...

Energy Policy: The president who often lets policy decisions be driven by others now says the pipeline to bring Canada's tar sands oil to America is his decision to make. So make it already, Mr. President. The administration's industrial policy of picking winners and losers, particularly in the energy sector, has given us such white, or should we say green, elephants as the bankrupt solar panel manufacturer Solyndra. It has an opportunity to pick a real winner — the Keystone XL pipeline to bring oil from Canada's rich tar sands to the American market. So far the administration has given...

Boondoggles: With the administration's approval, the recipient of another half-billion-dollar loan to build electric cars is outsourcing the work and any jobs that might be created or saved to Finland. The Fisker Karma electric car, heralded two years ago by Vice President Joe Biden as the future of the American auto industry, may prove to be another administration "bad bet," just as President Obama called Solyndra, heralded by Biden as the future of American energy. "Folks, we're making a bet," Biden said Oct. 27, 2009, using a familiar administration metaphor. "We're making a bet on the future, we're making a...

Election '12: A governor of an energy-rich state would use the "energy of the past" to create the jobs of the present rather than placing bets on solar panels and tilting at windmills. During the GOP presidential debates, Gov. Rick Perry was criticized for taking all the credit for Texas' job-creation record since he was not responsible for the oil and gas in the ground that created many of those jobs. True enough. But like Sarah Palin, the governor of another energy-rich state, he did foster a business-friendly climate as free from NIMBY regulations as possible, making the extraction of...

Energy Policy: Killing the Keystone XL pipeline may help one of the world's richest men get richer. North Dakota's booming oil fields will now grow more dependent on a railroad the president's economic guru just bought. Stop us if you see a pattern here. About the time George Soros — Hungarian billionaire and key donor to leftist groups and the Democratic Party — invested heavily in the stock of the state-run Brazilian oil company Petrobras, President Obama was curbing U.S. offshore oil production and the U.S. Export-Import Bank announced a $2 billion loan to Petrobras to finance deep-water drilling off...

Energy Policy: The administration plans to study rerouting the Keystone XL pipeline until after next year's election, delaying needed jobs and energy. By that time, Canada's oil will be on its way to China. That the American people are merely human sacrifices on the altar of environmentalism is seen by Thursday's announcement by the State Department that it has caved in to greenie demands that the Keystone XL pipeline intended to bring Canadian tar sands oil to the American market be rerouted around an aquifer that supplies water to eight states. The process will take at least a year, kicking...

Scandal: Our ever-campaigning president heads off to a fundraiser held by a politically connected businessman whose company took a $100 million stimulus tax credit. Solyndra didn't stop pay-for-play the "Chicago Way." Tone-deaf somehow does not seem adequate to describe President Obama's silent indifference to the Solyndra scandal of his making as he rushes off to another fundraiser, a $25,000 per person affair in Missouri on Oct. 4 organized by another beneficiary of our stimulus tax dollars. Tom Carnahan, of the Missouri Carnahans, arguably that state's most prominent political family, is listed on President Obama's campaign website as a host of...

Boondoggles: With a minimum of five green firms going bankrupt, taxpayers find themselves on the hook for at least one possibly illegal loan while paying ghastly sums for each green job created. We've been sunburned. As solar panel manufacturer Solyndra was sliding into a long-predicted bankruptcy, Energy Department officials began negotiations with the company and two of its main investors about restructuring its $535 million loan to keep afloat the business that was supposed to be a good investment. Under the restructuring agreement, Solyndra's private investors were moved to the front of the line and taxpayers were put on the...

Scandal: The White House pressured federal officials to OK a loan to an insolvent but politically tied green energy company in advance of a vice-presidential photo-op. Corruption is not an energy policy. Emails released to the Washington Post before Wednesday's hearings on the $535 million stimulus loan guarantee issued to now-bankrupt Solyndra Inc. reveal the extent of, and resistance to, White House pressure to get the loan approved so Vice President Joe Biden could announce it at a Sept. 4, 2009, groundbreaking event. The White House has denied applying pressure or even monitoring the review process, saying the stimulus loan...

Corruption: A top bundler and major investor in a now-bankrupt green company made multiple White House visits before he got a guaranteed stimulus loan that the administration monitored to ensure it was granted. During the Clinton administration, when the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House became a favorite place for campaign contributors to rest their weary wallets, the infamous Johnny Chung made the observation that the White House was like a subway turnstile. You put your token in and you got inside. Getting inside the White House was easy for billionaire investor George Kaiser, who made multiple visits to the...

Power Sources: A solar panel manufacturer touted by the president as a symbol of his successful green energy policies files for bankruptcy and cuts a thousand green jobs. Maybe its time to drill, baby, drill. During a visit to Solyndra Inc.'s Fremont, Calif., facility in spring of 2010, President Obama boasted of what the company was going to do with the $535 million in loan guarantees his stimulus package provided. "We can see the positive impacts right here at Solyndra," he said. "Through the Recovery Act, this company received a loan to expand its operations. This new factory is the...

Power: Despite efforts in the media and Congress to shut it down through fear and falsehoods, a new estimate of America's most promising energy source portends even more gas, oil — and jobs. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) announced Tuesday that the Marcellus Shale formation that straddles the northeastern United States may hold a staggering 84 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of recoverable natural gas, up significantly from the last official government estimate of 2 tcf made in 2002. The USGS said the estimate came from new information about the gas-rich formation underlying New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, and...

Energy: It won't matter which light bulbs we use as the administration's implementation of cross-state pollution rules shuts down coal plants across the country. Where will the jobs be when the lights go out? It's called the Cross-State Pollution Rule, announced last month, and its implementation over the next 18 months will likely result in the loss of a fifth of the nation's electricity-generating capacity. The result will be likely power shortages, skyrocketing rates and inevitable brownouts and rolling blackouts. Based on Bush-era EPA proposals that the federal courts threw out in 2008, this latest example of legislation is designed...

Rules: A bill encouraging the use of natural-gas-powered vehicles will give the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases while rewarding the Democratic left's patron saint. We like natural gas. It's the cleanest-burning fossil fuel, the U.S. has lots of it and, thanks to technologies such as hydraulic fracturing (aka "fracking"), we can get even more of it from the vast shale formations that dot the country. Others like it, too, which is why a bill floating through Congress, the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act of 2011 (HR 1380), or Nat Gas Act, has seen a number of...

Energy Policy: The former governor of energy-rich Alaska calls the administration's bluff: End tax breaks for all forms of energy, she says, and let the free market pick winners and losers. End the ethanol pandering too. She isn't running, or riding, for president, at least not yet. But at a stop on her One Nation bus tour, Sarah Palin offered a winning idea for an economy strapped for energy and jobs and saddled with unsustainable debt. "I think all our energy subsidies need to be re-looked at today and eliminated," Palin told Scott Conroy of Real Clear Politics during a...

Energy: Lack of oil volume due to administration bans on new Alaskan drilling may force the shutdown of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, denying us even the tens of billions of barrels left in already developed fields. The Trans-Alaskan pipeline is dying, another casualty of the Obama administration's war on domestic fossil fuel energy and its deliberate effort to drive up energy prices to make so-called "green" energy alternatives more attractive. It was built to handle the oil produced on Alaska's North Slope at Prudhoe Bay and was a marvel of American engineering and exceptionalism. When oil exploration began in Prudhoe Bay,...