Obama's Do-Nothing Oil Policy Hurts

The president said he was not "out of touch" as the media accused President George H.W. Bush of being when he demonstrated unfamiliarity with supermarket scanners. No, the president is plugged into reality as he test-drives overpriced electric cars no one wants and tours foreign-owned wind turbine plants. Speaking at such a plant in Fairless Hills, Pa., owned by the Spanish firm Gamesa, Obama said there was "not much we can do next week or two weeks from now" about gas prices. He didn't address his two-year war on domestic energy including a seven-year moratorium on oil drilling off both coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off Alaska. He could lift that ban today, sending a powerful supply-and-demand signal to the market. He could unlock areas in the West where oil shale reserves are estimated to be triple the crude Saudi Arabia has underground. He could support the Keystone pipeline project to deliver oil from Canada's tar sands to the U.S. market. That project would build a 1,661-mile pipeline from Alberta to refineries near Houston, create 13,000 "shovel-ready" jobs and provide 500,000 more barrels of oil per day. But the president who wants to reduce oil imports by a third wants to increase them from Brazil. Instead, the president says oil companies aren't using the leases they have. But an oil lease is only a license to explore, not a guarantee of finding oil. If there were oil in these areas that could be profitably extracted, oil companies would do so. They're not the ones who are driving up prices by restricting supply. It's an Obama administration that includes a secretary of energy, Steven Chu, who has said "we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." He was talking about $8 a gallon or higher...more

Another case where the Wise Ones are sticking it to the groups they supposedly represent - the lower income class. They have deliberately set out to raise oil prices to make renewables more attractive and to force conservation on the public. The green agenda trumps the less fortunate among us.