Green Energy

[pornstarwannabe]

There really is no such thing as American Green Jobs (at least not as portrayed by Obama). As long as companies can outsource to China, the engineering will be done in the US, but manufacturing done elsewhere. Obama knows that.

Better get that engineering degree for yourself and/or your kids.

 

[miles]

Nice article, but Obama is now and will continue to be immune to criticism.

 

[mercury14]

There really is no such thing as American Green Jobs (at least not as portrayed by Obama). As long as companies can outsource to China, the engineering will be done in the US, but manufacturing done elsewhere. Obama knows that.

Better get that engineering degree for yourself and/or your kids.

Why? The United States as the largest manufacturing base of any country.

 

[mercury14]

Nice article, but Obama is now and will continue to be immune to criticism.

Maybe if you're criticisms were coherent they would be taken seriously.

MUSLIM! ALGAE! PRO-TERRORIST! COMMIE!!!

TELEPROMPTERS!!!!!]


Big fucking mystery why these attacks don't stick...

 

[pornstarwannabe]

Why? The United States as the largest manufacturing base of any country.

Because unless the US entices US companies to build here, they they will go overseas to keep costs down. Look ate the iPhone. An invention that revolutionized communications. Why is it built overseas? Same reason.

 

[mercury14]

Because unless the US entices US companies to build here, they they will go overseas to keep costs down. Look ate the iPhone. An invention that revolutionized communications. Why is it built overseas? Same reason.

This is just a side effect of globalization. Republicans like to tout global free trade and then when jobs go to third world countries they blame Democrats for it.

China has a per capita income of $4k per year compared to $48k in America. Please show me which policy will entice our companies to pay $48k per worker instead of $4k.

 

[pornstarwannabe]

This is just a side effect of globalization. Republicans like to tout global free trade and then when jobs go to third world countries they blame Democrats for it.

China has a per capita income of $4k per year compared to $48k in America. Please show me which policy will entice our companies to pay $48k per worker instead of $4k.

Alas, I cannot show you a policy. I have no firm answer how Congress can entice companies to build here vs. China. I only hope the Politicos in Congress earn their salary and do their job. But I have a partial solution in this thread, but it may not work.

I have always been against free trade. IMO, free trade does not work.

 

[DevilishTexan]

Yeah until we hang every fking politician in Washington "green" will just be a pipe dream.

If you disagree with that you're a complete and utter retard and should just put your neck in the same noose because you're a great contributor to the problem.

 

[RightField]

March 6, 2012
The Global Warming Bubble
By Robert Tracinski

When the federal government bailed out General Motors, you may remember that we were told the government would transform GM by moving it away from manufacturing big, gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs (you know, the vehicles that were actually making a profit) and instead make sure that GM rode the real wave of the future: electric cars.

Well, here's where the wave of the future has taken us: GM just shut down the assembly line of its electric car, the Chevy Volt, for five weeks because demand for the Volt is making the Edsel look like a roaring success. Observers are divided over whether the Volt has flopped because of its limited all-electric range, its high price tag (despite massive government subsidies), or the fact that its battery might have a tendency to catch on fire.

The Volt is just the latest commercial failure for "green" technology. We are in the middle of what you might call a global warming bubble. It is a failure of the global warming theory itself and of the credibility of its advocates, but also a failure of the various "green energy" schemes proposed as a substitute for fossil fuels.

Take the sleek Tesla electric roadster, brought to you with about half a billion dollars in government-backed loans, which turns into an immovable "brick" if you run down its battery too far, say, by taking a long drive and parking it for a while.

The failure of the solar panel maker Solyndra has been followed by the bankruptcies of a variety of other government-subsidized green energy firms, such as Beacon Energy, which makes an energy storage device needed to smooth out the energy production of erratic "renewable" sources, and battery maker Ener1.

But maybe we're just not subsidizing green power enough, because surely you've heard--probably from Tom Friedman--that China is beating us to the future with its support for green energy. But China's solar energy firms are also heading into a slump and laying off workers. Part of the reason for the solar slump in China is that they were counting on generous subsidies for their product from the West, particularly Europe. In effect, the Chinese were manufacturing solar panels in order to cash in on subsidies from Western taxpayers. But now the subsidies are drying up.

That leads us to the most interesting of these stories. Germany is phasing out its solar subsidies, but the economically revealing part is why they are eliminating the subsidies. As Bjorn Lomborg explains:

"Subsidizing green technology is affordable only if it is done in tiny, tokenistic amounts. Using the government's generous subsidies, Germans installed 7.5 gigawatts of photovoltaic capacity last year, more than double what the government had deemed 'acceptable.' It is estimated that this increase alone will lead to a $260 hike in the average consumer's annual power bill."

At the end of last year, I wrote (in my own newsletter) about the marginal economics of the welfare state. Many welfare-state policies seem to work so long as they are implemented on a small scale but fail when they are expanded to cover a larger portion of the population. The Medicare program, for example, takes advantage of the fact that it can dictate lower prices for medical services, because it only needs to pay the marginal costs (the relatively low cost of treating one additional patient in an existing hospital), while non-Medicare patients are billed at higher rates to cover big capital expenditures (the cost of building the hospital in the first place). But if the government starts paying for all health care, it suddenly has to pay a lot more to fund those capital expenditures.

Something similar applies to green technology. It can be sustained only as a token or showpiece designed to distract attention from all of the coal, natural gas, and nuclear power stations that actually keep the lights on. The Chevy Volt, for example, is openly billed by GM as a "loss leader": they're losing money on it for the sake of all of the good "green" PR they hope to get. But the moment you try to use these technologies to generate a noticeable portion of a nation's electricity, the costs rise to ruinous levels.

Thus, as Lomborg explains:

"Solar power is at least four times more costly than energy produced by fossil fuels. It also has the distinct disadvantage of not working at night, when much electricity is consumed.

"In the words of the German Association of Physicists, 'solar energy cannot replace any additional power plants.' On short, overcast winter days, Germany's 1.1 million solar-power systems can generate no electricity at all. The country is then forced to import considerable amounts of electricity from nuclear power plants in France and the Czech Republic."

The same applies to wind energy, too, for the same reason. Just as the sun doesn't shine consistently every day, so the wind does not blow consistently. The natural fluctuation of wind power means that every megawatt of wind power requires an equal amount of conventional, fossil-fuel-powered generation to prevent power dips on the electric grid. Which is to say that solar panels and windmills are really just ornaments. They are monuments to greener-than-thou environmental vanity.

That these forms of renewable energy are capable of generating only minimal amounts of power is no accident. Ten years ago, I published an article by Jack Wakeland which examined the growth of "renewable energy" and concluded that every time an "alternative" power source grew large enough to produce energy on a truly industrial scale, environmentalists turned against it, as they have done with hydro-electric dams, geothermal plants, and even wind farms. So the fact that green energy is capable of generating only a small fraction of the power needed to fuel an industrial civilization is no accident. In effect, the inability to generate industrial-scale power is what makes green energy green.

But what that means is that green energy is doomed as an economic proposition. It has all of the hallmarks of an economic bubble. As with the Internet, housing, and higher-education bubbles, green energy is fiercely believed in, not just as an investment but as a superior lifestyle and a positive social good. And as with housing and education, it is propped up by government tax breaks, loan guarantees, and massive subsidies, all of which support a growing edifice of economically unproductive activity. But this artificial stimulation eventually expands the industry beyond the point where it can be sustained, either economically or politically, and the bubble bursts.

It looks like the global warming bubble is hitting that point.

 

[koalabear]

This is just a side effect of globalization. Republicans like to tout global free trade and then when jobs go to third world countries they blame Democrats for it.

China has a per capita income of $4k per year compared to $48k in America. Please show me which policy will entice our companies to pay $48k per worker instead of $4k.

NAFTA= Clinton
Largest tariff reductions in world history=Clinton
Clinton Administration concluded a landmark agreement for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Free trade will be great.

 

[LJ_Reloaded]

We need to prepare for that day in a way that doesn't increase energy prices by 50 or 100% domesitcally and which plunges many of our less affluent countrymen into immediate distress...not while we still have decades and decades of energy resources we can draw from in our own country.

In other words, we need a smart long term plan which includes greater harvesting of our natural resources now and a smart investment plan to develop viable alternatives over time.

News Flash!!!

Energy prices, particularly the cost of oil, have already gone up over 100% in the last decade. In fact they've gone up over 300%. Just so you know, oil prices abroad affect domestic prices of gasoline.

http://www.ioga.com/Special/crudeoil_Hist.htm

2002: January $16.65 July $23.69
2011: January $84.47 July $88.82

We also pay a VERY HIGH PRICE for "cheap" electricity, because of our reliance upon coal. Your KWH cost doesn't add in the air and water pollution, mercury poisoning of our fish, acid rain, or coal sludge accidents, that we Americans all have to pay for, all a result of coal-fired power plants. Any discussion about the cost of energy that doesn't include this, is total bullshit. These additional costs can be accounted for and traced.

 

[LJ_Reloaded]

NAFTA= Clinton
Largest tariff reductions in world history=Clinton
Clinton Administration concluded a landmark agreement for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Free trade will be great.

Wait, you guys support free trade and sending jobs to China. You said it would make America more prosperous.

That's why Reagan and Bush stood alongside Clinton while he signed that shit into law.

 

[Peregrinator]

News Flash!!!

Energy prices, particularly the cost of oil, have already gone up over 100% in the last decade. In fact they've gone up over 300%. Just so you know, oil prices abroad affect domestic prices of gasoline.

http://www.ioga.com/Special/crudeoil_Hist.htm

2002: January $16.65 July $23.69
2011: January $84.47 July $88.82

We also pay a VERY HIGH PRICE for "cheap" electricity, because of our reliance upon coal. Your KWH cost doesn't add in the air and water pollution, mercury poisoning of our fish, acid rain, or coal sludge accidents, that we Americans all have to pay for, all a result of coal-fired power plants. Any discussion about the cost of energy that doesn't include this, is total bullshit. These additional costs can be accounted for and traced.

Asking conservatives to factor in all the actual costs of the energy they burn is as likely to yield results as asking them to, you know, actually conserve.

You might enjoy this site: http://priceofoil.org/

 

[LJ_Reloaded]

Asking conservatives to factor in all the actual costs of the energy they burn is as likely to yield results as asking them to, you know, actually conserve.

You might enjoy this site: http://priceofoil.org/

If the Conservatives listen to rationality, the terror^H^H^H^H^H^Hflower children win!

 

[koalabear]

Asking conservatives to factor in all the actual costs of the energy they burn is as likely to yield results as asking them to, you know, actually conserve.

You might enjoy this site: http://priceofoil.org/

Another partisan post by the "I'm not a lib jerk". Give it up Merc.

 

[Peregrinator]

If the Conservatives listen to rationality, the terror^H^H^H^H^H^Hflower children win!

terror^H^H^H^H^H^Hflower

I do not understand this.

 

[Peregrinator]

Another partisan post by the "I'm not a lib jerk". Give it up Merc.

It's good to have a reliable rhythm section.

 

[LJ_Reloaded]

terror^H^H^H^H^H^Hflower

I do not understand this.

^H = standard unix backspace key when it's not translated as backspace.

Pronounce it "If the Conservatives listen to rationality, the terrorists-er, um, I mean Flower Children win!"

 

[Peregrinator]

^H = standard unix backspace key when it's not translated as backspace.

Pronounce it "If the Conservatives listen to rationality, the terrorists-er, um, I mean Flower Children win!"

Good god, man, you can't expect that level of geek from me. I just drive the thing.

 

[miles]

Another partisan post by the "I'm not a lib jerk". Give it up Merc.

Merc loves birds?

Who knew?

 

[RightField]

How Obama’s Energy Policy Will Kill Jobs
By Thomas A. Hemphill and Mark J. PerryThursday, March 8, 2012
The American

President Obama is once again proposing selectively punitive treatment of the oil and natural gas industry, one of the strongest job-creating sectors of the U.S. economy.

The oil and natural gas industry, one of the strongest job-creating sectors of the U.S. economy, has been unfavorably targeted by President Obama’s proposed 2013 fiscal year (FY) federal budget. To start with, Obama is proposing, for the fourth consecutive year, to repeal Section 199 of the “American Jobs Creation Act.” If enacted, this selectively punitive treatment would increase taxes on oil and natural gas companies by almost $12 billion over the next decade. It could possibly jeopardize some of the millions of American jobs supported by oil and natural gas producers and prolong the sub-par “jobless recovery.”

The Section 199 tax deduction is currently available to all U.S. manufacturers on their qualifying income from domestic production at a rate of 9 percent—all but the oil and natural gas industry, which is already unfairly penalized by previous legislation with only a 6 percent deduction.

Furthermore, the Obama budget additionally targets oil and natural gas companies for higher taxes by proposing to repeal: a) the expensing of intangible drilling costs, b) “last-in, first- out” (LIFO) accounting in favor of the higher-taxed “first-in, first-out” accounting methodology, c) the deduction for tertiary injectants (fluids, gases, and chemicals) that are used in unconventional drilling, and d) the percentage depletion allowance to recover costs for capital investments. Additional tax increases on the oil and natural gas industry would come from proposed modifications of the dual capacity rule (a U.S. tax policy that prevents the double taxation of foreign earnings), increasing the amortization period for exploration costs, and reinstating Superfund taxes.

Taken together, it is estimated by the American Petroleum Institute that all eight targeted proposals of the administration’s FY2013 budget would burden the oil and gas industry with almost $86 billion in higher taxes over the next ten years. Energy companies, who have recently been aggressively expanding operations in domestic oil and natural gas fields from North Dakota to Texas to Pennsylvania, will have an incentive to shift their operations overseas if U.S. tax policies make it less profitable to engage in domestic oil and natural gas exploration and drilling.

In the same FY2013 budget, President Obama has favorably targeted so-called “clean” energy for a variety of direct subsidies and preferences. The administration’s top ten budget provisions for green energy include the following:

• Extending the production tax credit (of 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity) for wind energy through calendar year 2013.
  
• Extending the Treasury Cash Grant Program (Section 1603 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) to assist small renewable energy companies through 2012, extending tax credits (for renewable companies able to use the credits) for one year, and converting the program into a refundable tax credit through 2016.
  
• Increasing research and development funding to $350 million for advanced energy technologies (up from $40 million disbursed by the U.S. Department of Energy over the last two years).
  
• Expenditures for clean domestic manufacturing, with $290 million for improving industrial processes and materials, and $5 billion for the “48C” clean energy tax credit available to manufacturers of “cleantech” products.
  
• Expenditures for solar and wind energy, providing $310 million for the SunShot Initiative, a program designed to make solar energy cost competitive with fossil fuel energy without government subsidies by 2020, and $95 million for wind energy, including expansion in offshore wind technologies.
  
• Expenditures for energy efficiency, including an 80 percent increase in funding to promote energy efficiency in commercial buildings and industries.
  
• A 10 percent increase in funding for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s FY2013 budget for implementation and enforcement of federal environmental safeguards, and $222 million for the U.S. Department the Interior’s newly formed Bureau of Safety and Environmental Protection.
  
• Expanding Department of Defense clean energy initiatives, including doubling (to $1 billion more than the FY2012 budget) expenditures for efficiency retrofitting of buildings and meeting efficiency standards for new facilities.
  
• Maintaining funding (at the FY2012 budget level) for international climate financing, with at least $833 million to support sustainable landscapes, clean energy, and adaptation to climate change in developing countries.

What makes this differential tax treatment especially misguided at this time is that the oil and natural gas industry has been one of the most robust sectors of the economy, actively creating the “shovel-ready” jobs that Obama agrees are so critical to the economic recovery.

Overall employment in the U.S. economy still remains short by almost 5 million jobs, and more than 3 percent below the pre-recession employment peak in November 2007. But the oil and natural gas industry has added 34,200 jobs over that period and expanded industry employment by more than 22 percent. Oil and natural gas companies have been on a hiring spree, adding almost 100 new payroll jobs every day for the last year.

In contrast, job creation in green energy projects has so far been very disappointing. According to a recent Wall Street Journal analysis of $4.3 billion in public funding for wind energy under Section 1603 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, there were 36 wind farms that employed 7,200 American workers during the peak of their construction, or an average of 200 workers per project. Today, according to these companies and state and local government economic development officials, those projects employ only about 300 workers, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $14 million per permanent job.

And consider the solar sector. Struggling company Abound’s recent announcement of 180 layoffs was the latest example of an ongoing solar shakeout that started with Solyndra’s bankruptcy last fall and the loss of 1,100 jobs. According to the Washington-based Solar Energy Industries Association, there are more than 37,000 additional solar jobs at risk, because the $10 billion of taxpayer-funded subsidies for renewable energy that were part of the aforementioned 2009 stimulus program expired in December.

The oil and gas industry could be creating even more jobs if the United States had more of a pro-development policy for traditional energy sources instead of a government-driven, heavily subsidized, green energy approach. For example, energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie evaluated the impact on production, jobs, and government revenues of implementing regulatory policies that support the development of oil and natural gas resources, including: a) opening federal land that is currently “off limits” to exploration and development; b) lifting the drilling moratorium in New York; c) increasing the rate of permitting in the offshore Gulf of Mexico; d) approving the Keystone XL and other future Canada-to-U.S. oil pipelines; and e) leaving regulation of shale resources predominantly at the state level.

Under a scenario that encourages the development of new and existing domestic energy resources, Wood Mackenzie estimates that by 2015 an additional 1.27 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) could be produced, rising to 10.4 million BOE by 2030. That would be a 47 percent increase over the estimated 2030 production levels under a current development path case.

Furthermore, under the new development path, there would be a potential increase of 1 million new oil and natural gas jobs by 2018, and 1.4 million new jobs by 2030, while adding cumulative potential government revenue of $36 billion by 2015, and nearly $803 billion by 2030.

America’s manufacturing sector is another area of robust job growth, and manufacturing companies have hired almost 400,000 new workers since the beginning of 2010. U.S. energy and tax policies have important implications for the manufacturing sector because of the energy intensity of America’s industrial sector. In 2010, it was estimated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration that roughly one-third of total U.S. delivered energy is consumed by the manufacturing sector. Additionally, total industrial demand for delivered energy will increase 16 percent by 2035. Nevertheless, the government estimates that fossil fuel consumption will decline only modestly, from 83 percent of total U.S. energy demand currently, to 77 percent in 2035. Therefore, traditional energy sources of oil and natural gas will continue to play a major role in providing stable supplies of affordable energy to America’s factories. To the extent that oil and natural gas companies are targeted with higher taxes or unfavorable regulatory policies by the Obama administration, American manufacturers will be hurt by higher energy prices, which could jeopardize job growth in one of the economy’s key sectors.

Obama’s tax proposals to favor solar and wind energy over traditional energy sources like oil and natural gas might make sense for him politically, but can’t be justified with either economic or scientific principles. Obama’s policies are destined to damage the economy because they will penalize the efficient, job-creating oil and natural gas industry, which requires no direct taxpayer subsidies beyond what any American manufacturer is entitled to, and because they will raise energy costs for American consumers and manufacturers. Meanwhile, subsidizing the inefficient green-energy industry with generous amounts of taxpayer money would destroy jobs on net and raise energy costs.

 

[RightField]

Obama’s oil flimflam
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: March 15

Yes, of course, presidents have no direct control over gas prices. But the American people know something about this president and his disdain for oil. The “fuel of the past,” he contemptuously calls it. To the American worker who doesn’t commute by government motorcade and is getting fleeced every week at the pump, oil seems very much a fuel of the present — and of the foreseeable future.

President Obama incessantly claims energy open-mindedness, insisting that his policy is “all of the above.” Except, of course, for drilling:

• Off the Mid-Atlantic coast (as Virginia, for example, wants);
  
• Off the Florida Gulf Coast (instead, the Castro brothers will drill near there);
  
• In the broader Gulf of Mexico (where drilling in 2012 is expected to drop 30 percent below pre-moratorium forecasts);
  
• In the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (more than half the size of England, the drilling footprint being the size of Dulles International Airport);
  
• On federal lands in the Rockies (where leases are down 70 percent since Obama took office).

But the event that drove home the extent of Obama’s antipathy to nearby, abundant, available oil was his veto of the Keystone pipeline, after the most extensive environmental vetting of any pipeline in U.S. history. It gave the game away because the case for Keystone is so obvious and overwhelming. Vetoing it gratuitously prolongs our dependence on outside powers, kills thousands of shovel-ready jobs, forfeits a major strategic resource to China, damages relations with our closest ally, and sends billions of oil dollars to Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin and already obscenely wealthy sheiks.

Obama boasts that, on his watch, production is up and imports down. True, but truly deceptive. These increases have occurred in spite of his restrictive policies. They are the result of Clinton- and Bush-era permitting. This has been accompanied by a gold rush of natural gas production resulting from new fracking technology that has nothing at all to do with Obama.

“The American people aren’t stupid,” Obama said (Feb. 23), mocking “Drill, baby, drill.” The “only solution,” he averred in yet another major energy speech last week, is that “we start using less — that lowers the demand, prices come down.” Yet five paragraphs later he claimed that regardless of “how much oil we produce at home . . . that’s not going to set the price of gas worldwide.”

So: Decreasing U.S. demand will lower oil prices, but increasing U.S. supply will not? This is ridiculous. Either both do or neither does. Does Obama read his own speeches?

Obama says of drilling: “That’s not a plan.” Of course it’s a plan. We import nearly half of our oil, thereby exporting enormous amounts of U.S. wealth. Almost 60 percent of our trade deficit — $332 billion out of $560 billion — is shipped overseas to buy crude.

Drill here and you stanch the hemorrhage. You keep those dollars within the U.S. economy, repatriating not just wealth but jobs and denying them to foreign unfriendlies. Drilling is the single most important thing we can do to spur growth at home while strengthening our hand abroad.

Instead, Obama offers what he fancies to be the fuels of the future. You would think that he’d be a tad more modest today about his powers of divination after the Solyndra bankruptcy, the collapse of government-subsidized Ener1 (past makers of the batteries of the future) and GM’s suspension of production — for lack of demand — of another federally dictated confection, the flammable Chevy Volt.

Deterred? Hardly. Our undaunted seer of the energy future has come up with his own miracle fuel: algae.

Why, explained Obama, “we can grow it right here in the United States.” (Sounds like a miraculous local find — except that it grows just about everywhere on earth.) Accordingly, yet another $14 million of taxpayer money will be sprinkled on algae research by Steven Chu’s Energy Department.

This is the very same Dr. Chu who famously said in 2008 that he wanted U.S. gas prices to rise to European levels of $8-$10 a gallon — and who on Tuesday, eight months before Election Day, publicly recanted before Congress, Galileo-style.

Who do they think they’re fooling? An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking — and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels — which we possess in staggering abundance — that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live.

High gasoline prices are a major political problem for Obama. They are not just a pain at the pump, however. They are a constant reminder of three years of a rigid, fatuous, fantasy-driven energy policy that has rendered us scandalously dependent and excessively vulnerable.

 

[RightField]

Stop the demagoguery on oil and gas, Mr. President
Washington Examiner
March 15, 2012

That was quite a performance Thursday at Prince George's Community College when President Obama spoke on energy issues. He repeated so many Big Green energy myths that even the most obsessive environmentalists must surely have been exhilarated. One of those myths deserves particular attention because it is at the core of Obama's "clean energy" agenda for America's future. As he so frequently does, Obama repeated the misleading assertion that America has only 2 percent of the world's proven oil reserves but uses 20 percent of all the oil consumed every year.

That claim is at such variance with the facts that even some liberal mainstream media people are beginning to question it. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post Fact Checker column, for example, concluded yesterday that, while "on the surface, the president's numbers are correct, based on official government data," they are actually "two bits of information that bear little relationship to each other." Thus, Kessler categorized Obama's claim as a "non sequitur fact."

Kessler is right because Obama's 2 percent figure represents only "proven reserves," which represent a narrow slice of what is actually underground. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, the 2 percent equals about 22 billion producible barrels. Obama would be more honest with Americans if he instead cited the government's estimates of "undiscovered technically recoverable oil," of which there are 140 billion barrels. How much of that becomes available depends mostly on technology. With the development of horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other new technologies, however, there is little doubt Americans will get the vast majority of those 140 billion barrels.

But to appreciate the true magnitude of as-yet untapped oil resources in or near the United States, consider these facts: The Institute for Energy Research reported last December that government data puts the total recoverable resources in North America at more than 1.7 trillion barrels. "That is more than the world has used since the first oil well was drilled over 150 years ago in Titusville, Pennsylvania," according to IER. "To put this in context, Saudi Arabia has about 260 billion barrels of oil in proved reserves. For comparative purposes, the technically recoverable oil in North America could fuel the present needs in the United States of seven billion barrels per year for around 250 years."

There is comparable data for natural gas. At present, the U.S. has 272.5 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves, but the total for all of North America is 4.7 quadrillion. At the current consumption rate of 24 trillion cubic feet annually, there is enough natural gas under Canada, Mexico and the U.S. to last 175 years. To put that in further perspective, IER estimates that "the United States, Canada and Mexico have more technically recoverable natural gas resources than the combined total proved natural gas reserves found in Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkmenistan."

Data like these make it clear that America's biggest problem on these issues isn't that it's impossible to "drill, drill, drill," but rather that the president, his appointees at agencies like EPA and the departments of energy and interior, and his Democratic allies in the Senate refuse to deal with the world as it is instead of how they wish it could be.

 

[Peregrinator]

Given this expansion, it’s hard to claim that excessive regulation has crippled energy production. Indeed, reporting in The Times makes it clear that U.S. policy has been seriously negligent — that the environmental costs of fracking have been underplayed and ignored. But, in a way, that’s the point. The reality is that far from being hobbled by eco-freaks, the energy industry has been given a largely free hand to expand domestic oil and gas production, never mind the environment.

Strange to say, however, while natural gas prices have dropped, rising oil production and a sharp fall in import dependence haven’t stopped gasoline prices from rising toward $4 a gallon. Nor has the oil and gas boom given a noticeable boost to an economic recovery that, despite better news lately, has been very disappointing on the jobs front.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/o...-born-drillers.html?_r=1&src=tp&smid=fb-share

 

[RightField]

RSS



EDITORIAL: Obama’s gasoline excuse machine
President’s effort to shore up energy strategy not going down well
The Washington Times
Monday, March 19, 2012

President Obama noticed spiraling gasoline prices have opened a hole in his bid for a second term in the White House large enough to drive a fuel tanker through. American voters ought not to let the president fill that void with lame excuses or empty promises. There's only one way to prove his leadership for another four years will pull gas costs back from the red zone: Let the oil flow.

Prices at the pump have soared to near-record levels, now averaging $3.84 a gallon nationwide. GOP presidential candidates have correctly laid blame at the Oval Office door. Mr. Obama has fired back that there's "no silver bullet" that will bring down gas prices. Sticking to his guns, he lobbied Democratic senators earlier this month to block Republican efforts to resurrect the proposed 1,700 mile Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would have supplied the United States with 700,000 barrels of Canadian crude a day.

The "no silver bullet" argument has proved to be a dud, however, as polls show Americans overwhelmingly blame the president for expensive gas. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the way he is handling this pocketbook issue.

The president has boasted that domestic oil production has risen since he took office in 2009 but fails to mention that operations on private lands are responsible for the increase. The amount of petroleum extracted from federal lands - under White House jurisdiction - actually fell 13 percent in 2011, according to the Institute for Energy Research. Tumbling in tandem is oil yield from the Gulf of Mexico, dropping from a third of the nation's total to a quarter since Mr. Obama clamped down on offshore drilling following the 2010 BP oil spill. His overall approval rating likewise has skidded 9 points in the past month to a dismal 41 percent, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News survey.

Mr. Obama has taken to charging that his GOP presidential challengers act as if they can wave "a magic wand" and provide an endless supply of cheap gas. Meanwhile, he has conjured some magic of his own, pressuring Saudi Arabia to sell the United States more petroleum, and the kingdom has responded by boosting shipments by 25 percent since the beginning of the year. Increased supply is meant to lower gas prices by easing oil-market jitters over potential disruptions arising from Iran's nuclear program. So far, it hasn't worked.

During his Saturday radio address, Mr. Obama vilified Big Oil and urged Congress to end its annual tax breaks worth $4 billion: "Your member of Congress should be fighting for you, not for big financial firms. Not for big oil companies." Killing the tax deductions would only make gas even costlier as companies pass along the costs to consumers.

Inhibiting domestic oil production and increasing energy dependency on unfriendly regimes consigns the nation to persistent economic hardship. It doesn't take a wizard to divine what polls are saying: If you want a second term, put down the magic wand, drilling bans and green fantasies. Let the free market provide affordable gas.