Obama pushes up oil, gas and electric rates as he promised

January 6, 2011 15:16


Obama seems to be doing everything in his power to increase the price of gasoline, oil and all forms of energy in America.

Governor Sean Parnell railed against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) delays in permitting oil wells off the coast of Alaska.

“It is extremely disheartening that Shell has been unsuccessful in trying to get this critical permit for almost four years,” Governor Parnell said. “They have invested tens of millions of dollars in pollution control equipment, and met or exceeded every request made of them, yet they still can’t get a permit to drill a single exploration well off the coast of Alaska.

“This decision comes on top of the continuous challenges and delays caused by other federal agencies. Nothing can replace the jobs that Alaska and America lose when one resource project after another is delayed by endless appeals. The federal permitting system is broken and we are paying the price. These appeals are not all about protecting the environment or the health of Alaskans. They are primarily about outside groups opposed to development and a federal administration in Washington, D.C. all too willing to accommodate them.

“I intend to work with members of Congress, fellow governors and others to bring attention to these concerns and to seek legislative or administrative solutions. We must find a way to allow this and other responsible resource development.”

Oil prices are rising high enough to send the fragile US economy into a double dip recession. The economy runs on energy and rising costs for oil work their way into almost every product and service.

Before his election Obama promised his plan would make electricity rates ‘skyrocket’. Since he took office the price of oil has skyrocketed 117% and gasoline has increased 67%. While talking big on energy independence Obama’s real energy agenda is pushed by his tyrannical EPA.

Even when Obama supposedly ended limits on offshore drilling before the big spill he planned to let the EPA regulate the industry to a quit death. Things are going as planned as the Wall Street Journal reports:

“More than two months after the Obama administration lifted its ban on drilling in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico, oil companies are still waiting for approval to drill the first new oil well there. Experts now expect the wait to continue until the second half of 2011, and perhaps into 2012.

The impact of the delays goes beyond the oil industry. The Gulf coast economy has been hit hard by the slowdown in drilling activity, especially because the oil spill also hurt the region’s fishing and tourism industries. The Obama administration in September estimated that 8,000 to 12,000 workers could lose their jobs temporarily as a result of the moratorium; some independent estimates have been much higher.

The Energy Information Administration, the research arm of the Department of Energy, last month predicted that domestic offshore oil production will fall 13% this year from 2010 due to the moratorium and the slow return to drilling; a year ago, the agency predicted offshore production would rise 6% in 2011. The difference: a loss of about 220,000 barrels of oil a day.”

It is economic suicide to use a disproved theory of global warming as an excuse to minimize energy production of our own US resources. The EPA is waging a war on oil.

Steve Early at American Solutions points out five things Obama has done to raise gas prices:

Cancelling existing permits: Immediately after taking office in 2009, President Obama’s handpicked Secretary of the Department of Interior, Ken Salazar, canceled 77 leases for oil and gas drilling in Utah. ….. One year later, the administration canceled 61 more leases, this time in Montana, as part of President Obama’s war on global warming.

Needlessly delaying offshore leasing: Not long after Ken Salazar canceled the Utah leases, he decided to extend for another six months the public comment period for new offshore drilling. ……. Adding insult to injury is that the additional public comments for which the White House asked actually supported expanding offshore drilling by a two-to-one margin, a fact that the administration deliberately kept hidden from the American people. Put simply, the Obama administration did not want any additional offshore drilling, and the fact that the public overwhelmingly opposed them wasn’t going to stop them from pursuing their ideological goal.

Pushing for more taxes on American energy: When the Pelosi-led House of Representatives passed its massive cap and trade energy tax, the Obama administration celebrated. …. When all efforts to pass cap and trade legislatively failed miserably, Obama ignored the message — that Americans strongly oppose new energy taxes — and moved instead to impose a carbon cap administratively through the EPA. Such regulation targets all sectors of the economy, including transportation and oil production and refining, which ultimately means higher gasoline prices at the pump.

Imposing a moratorium on oil and gas drilling: [after the oil spill]The Obama administration then imposed a six-month moratorium on offshore drilling, claiming that the experts they consulted had advised them to take such an action. Except they hadn’t. The experts stated publicly that they never supported such a moratorium, and that the White House had manipulated their opinions and expertise solely to advance a political agenda. Because the administration had no basis for its ban, two federal courts stated on three separate occasions that the moratorium was unjust. The Obama administration ignored the experts and the courts and kept the ban in place; Salazar said that lifting the moratorium would make him “uncomfortable.”

Issuing a new offshore drilling ban: Within weeks of announcing that the moratorium had come to an end, the White House announced a new executive ban on offshore drilling, a ban that is almost identical to what was in place until 2008 when gasoline prices began their climb past $4 per gallon.

And it doesn’t stop with oil production. West Virginia has had to sue the EPA over coal killing regulations.  In speaking of the lawsuit Gov. Manchin said “Over the past year and a half, we have been fighting President Obama’s administration’s attempts to destroy our coal industry and way of life in West Virginia”. He went on to say that the EPA has “usurped the authority of the state and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection to oversee and regulate important aspects of our environment, like water quality,” and “These actions by U.S. EPA are threatening not only to end surface coal mining in West Virginia but to affect all forms of mining in the state.”

A report put out by by the monority on the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works entitled EPA’S ANTI-INDUSTRIAL POLICY: “THREATENING JOBS AND AMERICA’S MANUFACTURING BASE” stated that:

“The evidence is clear: these rules threaten the economic viability of America’s manufacturing base and hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs. Moreover, these rules will bring little, if any, public health or environmental benefits. As Americans suffer through a jobless recovery, EPA is pursuing policies that exacerbate our economic problems and do not improve the environment.”

Further on it points out that by the EPA’s own estimate these rules will have an environmental effect so minuscule as to be immeasurable.

‘One might expect that these costs would at least be offset with meaningful environmental benefits. Yet EPA’s own analysis shows that’s not the case. In estimating the impacts on global temperatures of the agency’s mobile source rule, EPA concluded:

“Based on the reanalysis the results for projected atmospheric CO2 concentrations are estimated to be reduced by an average of 2.9 ppm (previously 3.0 ppm), global mean temperature is estimated to be reduced by 0.006 to 0.0015 °C by 2100.”’ [emphasis added]

And yet these rules and regulations would kill tens of thousands of jobs in construction, steel plants, coal industry, oil production, gasoline refineries. It would cause the loss of coal plants, cement plants, and has already cost tens of thousands of jobs in the oil industry on the gulf coast. An ally of the EPA action, The Sierra Club, brags that it has stopped 100 new coal plants since 2001. “Stopping one hundred coal plants is a huge milestone in our fight to end global warming, but the coal industry is still pushing forward with plans for dozens of new plants in places, like Michigan and Kansas, and pouring money into slick advertising campaigns and lobbying efforts,” said Nilles. “As we celebrate this amazing milestone, we must redouble our efforts to stop new plants and replace the existing coal plants with clean energy.” ~ Sierra Club press release. The Sierra Club is a powerful Washington lobbyist spending $1,580,000 on lobbying in the last three years according to OpenSecrets.org. Environmental groups as an industry have spent $14,746,646 on lobbying in 2010, $22,458,950 in 2009 and $17,953,057 in 2008 for a total in the last three years of over $55 MILLION!

OpenSecrets.org points out that 94% of environmental groups contributions to candidates went to Democrats:

During the 2008 election cycle, environmental groups gave $4.5 million to federal candidates and party committees, 94 percent of which went to Democrats. The movement’s financial clout may be understated in these figures, however, as the Sierra Club—which is already one of the largest contributors—has elected in recent years to spend money on direct “issue ads” rather than giving it to candidates or political parties.

A Wall Street journal article on coal titled ‘Turning Away From Coal‘ says the movement away from coal plants is accelerating:

‘Some utilities are closing coal-fired plants; others are converting them to run on gas.

“It’s pretty clear that, whether it’s caused by future carbon legislation or action by the EPA, the migration away from coal has begun,” says Constellation Energy Group Chief Executive Mayo Shattuck.

Coal-burning facilities are expected to slip to 10% of total new capacity in the U.S. in 2013, down from 18% in 2009, the U.S.’

The state of Texas has also had to sue the EPA over greenhouse gas regulations and permitting. Govenor Rick Perry issued the following statement about the suit against the EPA:

“The EPA’s overreach is as potentially devastating as it is unnecessary, as Texas has achieved greater improvements in air quality than the nation as a whole since 2000 through our use of incentives and innovation.

Instead of worrying about cleaner air, the EPA seems intent upon putting the jobs of tens of thousands of hardworking Texans at risk, mainly so the EPA can impose a system it says will be easier for Washington bureaucrats to understand.

The EPA’s actions would likely result in significantly higher prices for energy and just about everything else, a frightening prospect during a time so many Americans are struggling to make ends meet.

I applaud General Abbott’s actions, and will continue to pressure Congress and the Obama administration to get the EPA under some control before irrevocable damage is done to one of the country’s strongest economies.”

We have covered the endless exposure of the fraud, cover up and outright propaganda the the UN IPCC climate report was based on. The EPA then based its own findings in part on the IPCC report. The EPA even supressed a dissenting report from its own scientists. Christopher Neefus at CNSNews.com exposed the coverup:

‘The EPA did not publicly release a March report that raised questions about the validity of the agency’s conclusions that carbon emissions are a cause of global warming and a danger to human health–primary assumptions behind the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House on Friday.

The report was an evaluation of the EPA’s current Technical Support Document (TSD), analyzing the endangerment of human health caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the document, these were some of the factual concerns the EPA had not addressed in the TSD:

–The TSD glosses over long-term cyclical variations in ocean temperature, similar to El Nino, which “are by far the best single explanation for global temperature fluctuations,” says the report.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation are such variations, and occur in roughly 60-year cycles, as opposed to the 3-5 year El Nino cycle. Their role is “not really explained in the draft TSD,” the report says. “(A)t the very least, there needs to be an explanation as to why (EPA) believes that these evident cycles do not exist or why they are much more unimportant than we believe them to be.”

–The TSD neglects to explore the “strong association between solar sunspots/irradiance and global temperature fluctuations.” It dismissed solar variations based on data obtained by a U.N. climate panel, but the veracity of that data has since been called into question. New research “suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68 percent of the increase in Earth’s global temperatures.”

– The TSD’s assumption that greenhouse gases have triggered global warming is hard to verify, because “changes in (greenhouse gas) concentrations appear to have so little effect that it is difficult to find any effect in the satellite temperature record, which started in 1978.”

–Global temperatures have declined for 11 straight years, and at the same time, “atmospheric CO2 levels have continued to increase and CO2 emissions have accelerated.” The TSD does not reconcile these findings.

–The TSD finds that there is endangerment to Americans’ health and welfare due to greenhouse gas emissions, but the dissenting report says there is an “obvious logical problem posed by steadily increasing U.S. health and welfare measures.”

The report calls for a thorough internal review of the science used in the EPA’s guidance on global warming: “We believe that this review should start immediately and be a continuing effort as long as there is a serious possibility that EPA may be called upon to implement regulations designed to reduce global warming.”

The document, however, was never released by the EPA …’

So we have a president who promised a plan that would ‘skyrocket’ electricity rates, a federal agency that bases its illegal and tyrannical power grab on fraudulent data and suppressed any dissent, and an administration that is collectively working to ruin the oil, steel, coal, and cement industries. An administration that ignores the will of the people and its congress and seems to be doing all it can to destroy jobs and the economy while promising to make jobs and economic growth its first priority. Are we going to believe what they say or what they do?

~ Michael Whipple, Editor usACTIONnews.com



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