Free Republic

Energy Policy: Leases and production are down on federal lands, the EPA is waging war on coal, and as for building enough pipelines to encircle the earth, we'd settle for just one from Canada to the Gulf. When President Obama, in responding Tuesday to Mitt Romney's chiding about failing to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, claimed that his administration has added enough new oil and gas pipelines to "encircle the Earth and then some," we felt a perfect response from Romney would have been, "You didn't build that." In fact, energy companies have built some 55,000 miles of pipeline, including...

Energy Policy: As the administration fast-tracks solar projects on public lands, it has locked up more than half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, preferring to continue outsourcing energy jobs and dollars. The price of gasoline, which was $1.84 a gallon the day President Obama took office, has more than doubled since, willfully aided and abetted by an administration that claims we can't drill our way to energy independence as we ignore vast reserves of North American energy that dwarf OPEC's and we sit on 100 years' supply of petroleum. Few Americans have heard of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska...

Energy Policy: As the administration fast-tracks solar projects on public lands, it has locked up more than half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, preferring to continue outsourcing energy jobs and dollars. The price of gasoline, which was $1.84 a gallon the day President Obama took office, has more than doubled since, willfully aided and abetted by an administration that claims we can't drill our way to energy independence as we ignore vast reserves of North American energy that dwarf OPEC's and we sit on 100 years' supply of petroleum. Few Americans have heard of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska...

Carbon emissions in the U.S. have hit a 20-year low due to a supposedly environmentally unfriendly drilling technique that has created an abundance of cheap natural gas. The free market, it seems, does it better than the EPA. Environmentalists find themselves between shale rock and a hard place after a little noticed technical report documented how the natural gas boom caused by the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has actually helped the environment in a major way while also creating jobs and economic growth. In the report, the U.S. Energy Information Agency, a part of the Energy Department, said...

Politics: As he flies into an Ohio air base that budget cuts will close, the president won't also be visiting an Ohio coal-mining operation shut down by his policies. Hey, isn't he trying to win that state? As Air Force One touched down Wednesday in Mansfield, Ohio, President Obama found himself at the site of one of the possible casualties of his defense cuts — the 179th Airlift Wing of the Ohio Air National Guard. It employs more than 200 airmen and more than 550 part-time employees. Despite administration denials, the 179th Airlift Wing may be doomed. It was targeted...

Energy: The top White House energy aide says new regulations gripping the technology responsible for unlocking America's vast oil and gas reserves will be ready by year's end. Team Obama's war on fossil fuels continues. One more reason not to re-elect President Obama to a second term was provided last Friday, when Heather Zichal, the top White House energy aide, told reporters that she expects the Interior Department rules regulating hydraulic fracturing, dubbed fracking, to be completed by year's end. Why are federal rules necessary since fracking has been successfully regulated at the state level for decades without a single...

Industrial Policy: For a $9 billion investment, the administration created just over 900 new, permanent jobs. We could've had 20,000 jobs building a pipeline with not a dollar of taxpayer money being wasted. According to the report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, Section 1503 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka the stimulus), the part that covers green energy projects got some $9 billion in stimulus cash for 2009-11 and created a whopping 910 direct jobs — those involved in the ongoing operation of the wind and solar projects...

Energy Boom: One state has found a solution to job and economic growth so successful it may eliminate one of the most onerous of taxes. It turns out that, yes, we can drill our way out of our problems. On Tuesday in North Dakota, a state flush with revenues from oil produced from the Bakken Shale formation it sits astride, voters were deciding whether theirs will become the first and only state not to have a property tax. If it passes (polls didn't close until after our press time), it ll be the first time a state has eliminated a...

Energy: A green administration blocks the safe storage of nuclear waste and refuses even to acknowledge nuclear power has a future. But after the GOP House votes to open a safe site, the nuclear debate has been reopened. Actually "waste" is an inaccurate term for the spent nuclear fuel rods still accumulating at above-ground fuel storage sites around the country, many near major cities. Spent nuclear fuel is a renewable resource that, in generating energy after being reprocessed, emits no greenhouse gasses. But wait, critics shout, what about Fukushima and Chernobyl? Certainly Russian incompetence and Japanese carelessness produced tragic results....

Energy: As coal use drops, job losses rise and electricity prices skyrocket, an electoral map of the 16 top coal-mining states does not bode well for an administration whose energy policy consists of algae and exploding electric cars. Earlier this year, Houston-based GenOn Energy Inc. announced plans to close five of its older coal-fired power plants in Pennsylvania over the next four years, saying that tough new environmental rules make it unprofitable to operate the plants, which generate a total of 3,140 megawatts of electricity. The plants are in Portland, Shawville, Titus, New Castle and Elrama. Two plants in Ohio...

Energy: The Government Accountability Office tells Congress the Green River Formation out West contains an "amount about equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves." So why are we keeping it locked up on federal lands? Exploding the Big Lie pushed by President Obama that we can't drill our way out of high gas prices because we have but 2% of the world's proven oil reserves, Anu Mittal, GAO director of natural resources and environment, testified before Congress last week that just one small part of the U.S. is capable of outproducing the rest of the planet. That small part...

Politics: The president tells building-and-trades union workers that Republicans have blocked multiple bills putting them to work, even as he blocks an oil pipeline their former union chief supported. President Obama may have thought he was preaching to the choir when he addressed the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department Legislative Conference on Monday, blaming Republicans for blocking his attempts at job creation. But he forgot one of the cardinal rules of public speaking — know your audience. "I've said now is the time to do this, interest rates are low, construction workers are out of work ... and time...

Energy: The effect of restricting domestic oil production isn't limited to gas prices. Petroleum is used to make or move everything we buy. So a higher price amounts to an unconscionable tax on middle and working classes. Pump prices are now more than $2 higher than they were when President Obama took office. For a middle-class family that fills up, say, two cars with 15-gallon gas tanks each week, that amounts to an extra $3,100 a year — no small expense. But it's not just the price of filling up the family cars that's getting harder to afford. From the...

Green Energy: Another day and another set of layoffs at a Department of Energy-backed solar company and an electric-car maker funded with stimulus dollars. Yet the President wants to double down on green energy. First Solar, a solar energy company that received a $1.46 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, announced Monday it will lay off 2,000 workers worldwide. In December, First Solar laid off 100 employees at a Santa Clara , Calif., plant. The DOE has committed the loan to a project in Riverside County, Calif., expected to create a whopping 15 permanent jobs and 550 construction...

Energy Policy: A Chinese oil company is now the world's top producer. While we sleep and watch pump prices rise, China, India and even Cuba seek supplies the world over, including drilling off the Florida coast. Global demand for oil is rising, as is its global price, as energy-hungry economies such as China, India and Brazil scour the earth for oil they know will be the energy of the present for some time to come. Even those lacking their own technology are asking others to help them get more. For them, there is no such thing as "peak oil." The...

Energy Policy: The administration claims there's no "silver bullet" to lower gas prices and that they've kept rising in the face of higher domestic production, as if the law of supply and demand has suddenly been repealed. It hasn't, and increased production on private and state lands doesn't blunt the impact on prices when 94% of federal onshore lands and 97% of federal offshore lands are off-limits to oil and gas drilling. A key factor in gas prices is and always has been future supplies and potential disruptions to those supplies. Another is the fact that we are the only...

Energy Policy: The Interior Department announces a five-year environmental study of offshore oil sites along the Atlantic coast with possible drilling off the Old Dominion in 2018 — only seven years after a promised lease sale. Despite taking credit for rising oil production on private and state lands he has nothing to do with, and claiming he supports opening up areas for domestic exploration as part of his "all-of-the-above" energy policy, President Obama in fact despises domestic fossil fuel production and moves to block it at every opportunity. During a visit to Norfolk, Va., last week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar...

Politics: The president stages a photo-op in Oklahoma to take credit for the portion of the Keystone XL pipeline that doesn't need his approval and for oil production on private and state lands beyond his jurisdiction. If one of his aides some morning remarked on a particularly lovely sunrise, it wouldn't surprise us if President Obama responded with a "thank you," so gifted is he in taking credit for successes that he has nothing to do with and that occur despite, not because, of his policies. So it will be Thursday, when Obama is scheduled to appear in Cushing, Okla.,...

Energy: The economist at the newspaper of record defends the president's energy policy of Solyndra, Chevy Volts and algae while dismissing the oil boom on private lands as a small-town hiccup with no impact on price. New York Times columnist and Keynesian economist Paul Krugman asks in a recent column why gas prices are rising if we are in the middle of a domestic oil boom. Doesn't the "drill, baby, drill" crowd claim, he argues, that prices will drop "if only we would stop protecting the environment and let energy companies do whatever they want"? Without our domestic oil boom,...

Energy Policy: After presidential lobbying, the Senate fell four votes short of taking a giant step toward energy independence as gas prices and unemployment rise. In the White House, everything is going according to plan. The 56-42 vote defeated a proposal by Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., that would have granted approval of the pipeline without any further environmental reviews by the State Department. It came after President Obama personally called lawmakers to lobby for the Hoeven amendment's defeat. Sixty votes were needed for passage to avoid a filibuster. As we've said, you have to watch what Obama does, not what...