Obama Administration sitting on its hands on energy?
If you haven’t noticed during the busy campaign, gas prices are going up again:
In the meantime, the public comment period on lease-sales ended, and apparently it is overwhelmingly in favor (2-1) of opening our shores up for exploration and drilling, but Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar has yet to release those comments.
In the written information request, Vince Haley of American Solutions said he believes that government workers “have confirmed” that comments supporting offshore drilling outnumbered anti-drilling comments by a 2-1 margin. That dovetails with public opinion polls showing most Americans favor more drilling in the outer continental shelf, he said.
A Minerals Management Service spokesman said the agency would provide a break- down after it had finished analyzing the submissions.
Haley said that a strong majority in favor of expanded coastal drilling would put pressure on the administration “to explain why they aren’t moving forward.”
Salazar has suggested that the Interior Department could wait until the current plan governing outer continental shelf energy leases expires in 2012 before issuing a new one. The five-year plan proposed under former President George W. Bush would have covered leasing from 2010 through 2015 and would have opened up areas where drilling has been off-limits.
And as a backdrop for all this, the Congressional Research Service says this nation possesses more barrels of oil than anyone else on earth, but that we’ve only tapped into 13% of it (not to mention we’re also tops in coal).
The United States leads the world with 1,321 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) followed by Russia with 1,248 billion BOE, Saudi Arabia with 543 billion BOE, then Iran and Canada.
Regarding Coal, the U.S. has 28% of the globe’s resources.
Virginia also has one of the largest Uranium deposits in the world and a natural environment on the coast and/or in the mountains for wind farms.
With the election of Bob McDonnell to governor, it would be nice to see if some of these resources can be developed in a safe, efficient, and environmentally-sound manner, but only if the federal government quits sitting on its hands and ignoring the public.
(h/t: Human Events)
Category: Government
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The rise in gas prices has more to do with increases in the money stock and the fact that the dollar wont be the standard of measure for oil very much longer. An increase in domestic supply would not affect price levels for quite some time. It could be assumed that the announcement of exploration would lead to a price reduction simply because the price of oil is so much speculation, however such an announcement would more likely precipitate Iran and the GCC moving away from the dollar at an even faster pace. Increased domestic production would further destabilize the price of oil and this is not something OPEC wants.