With Oil Prices Rising, Obama Looks To….Reduce Imports!

The Professor In Chief is going to detail his college level thesis on how to fix the energy messes today, and, it will go exactly how you think

With gasoline prices rising, oil supplies from the Middle East pinched by political upheaval and growing calls in Congress for expanded domestic oil and gas production, President Obama on Wednesday will set a goal of a one-third reduction in oil imports over the next decade, aides said Tuesday.

On the surface, not a bad idea. I think we can all agree we need to decrease our dependence on foreign oil, which provides cash flow for despots and terrorists.

The president, in a speech to be delivered at Georgetown University, will say that the United States needs, for geopolitical and economic reasons, to reduce its reliance on imported oil, according to White House officials who provided a preview of the speech on the condition that they not be identified. More than half of the oil burned in the United States today comes from overseas and from Mexico and Canada.

Damned Canadians!

Mr. Obama will propose a mix of measures, none of them new, to help the nation cut down on its thirst for oil. He will point out the nation’s tendency, since the first Arab oil embargo in 1973, to panic when gas prices rise and then fall back into old gas-guzzling habits when they recede.

He will call for a consistent long-term fuel-savings strategy of producing more electric cars, converting trucks to run on natural gas, building new refineries to brew billions of gallons of biofuels and setting new fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles. Congress has been debating these measures for years.

So, really, nothing that will decrease the price of oil in the short or long term, just measures that will increase prices of everything else. Hey, maybe if we could build new oil refineries…. Anyhow, I will give Champ this, he will supposedly push for more nuclear, as well as natural gas and clean coal (though, I still don’t buy into “clean coal.”)

He will respond to members of Congress and oil industry executives who have complained that the administration has choked off domestic oil and gas production by imposing costly new regulations and by blocking exploration on millions of acres of potentially oil-rich tracts both on shore and off.

The administration is not prepared to open new public lands and waters to drilling, officials said, but will use a new set of incentives and penalties to prod industry to develop resources on the lands they already have access to.

The Interior Department on Tuesday issued a paper saying that more than two-thirds of offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico and more than half of onshore leases on federal lands are unused. Oil industry officials called the paper a smokescreen to cover the administration’s stingy approach to drilling permits.

There’s a reason they are unused: there is little to gain from those leases

“The majority of these leases are always turned back because we can’t find resource in commercial quantities,” said Jack Gerard, the president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute. “To suggest that we’re sitting on our hands is a pure distraction.”

Oil companies are not going to sit on their hands when there is oil to be taken from the ground which would make them profit.

Obama’s problem is that this all seems to be a college exercise to him, and he fails to see the real world implications, nor does he understand that these decades in the future programs do not help anyone now.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach

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