Obama Takes Credit for Shale Gas Drilling in Election Year
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this week (We Don’t Need More Foreign Oil and Gas), Obama supporters and long-time Democrat flacks John Podesta and Tom Steyer tried to make the argument that we don’t need Canada’s oil (and natural gas) because we now have enough of our own, thank you very much. Apparently Obama is getting heat for his disastrous decision to pander to environmental extremists and reject the Keystone XL pipeline that would not only have brought cheap Canadian oil to the U.S. (at a time of record-highs for oil), but also would have brought more U.S. oil to the U.S. from North Dakota’s Bakken field.
Messrs. Podesta and Steyer’s opening sentence said:
In the hubbub around the president’s decision not to approve the proposed Keystone XL pipeline between Canada and the United States, Americans missed the big picture.
Translation: You’re too dumb to understand The One’s decision on this important matter. We’ll explain it to you.
We then get this choice paragraph:
Under President Obama’s leadership, we appear to be at the beginning of a domestic gas and oil boom. After a four-decade decline in oil production, the U.S. is now producing more than half of our oil domestically. This can free us from our addiction to foreign-sourced barrels, particularly if we utilize our dramatically larger and cheaper natural gas reserves. Natural gas now costs the equivalent of less than $15 per barrel, versus the $100-plus barrels we import from the Middle East.
Breathtaking chutzpah. Obama had nothing to do with the present “boom.” One could argue that Dick Cheney has had more to do with the current boom than anyone else—Cheney used to be CEO of Halliburton, which is the number one provider of hydraulic fracturing services in the U.S. In fact, the Obama administration has repeatedly interfered with natural gas and oil drilling. His rogue EPA is trying to either regulate, or shut down, hydraulic fracturing in this country! He disallowed any new offshore drilling after the BP disaster, driving drilling platforms away from our shores. Funny how election year conversions work. Look around and find an issue that will be popular with the voting public, and latch onto it as your own, even if a) you don’t believe in it, and b) you didn’t have a thing to do with it.
Pro-drillers welcome Obama’s lip service to shale gas drilling and we should take every advantage of it, but make no mistake, Obama and his ideological supporters like Podesta and Steyer still hate fossil fuels, including natural gas. Just read the rest of the op-ed where they get down to the topic they really love—“clean energy”—and how America is a leader in clean energy and everything will be butterflies and pink unicorns when we finally all convert to solar and wind. Oh! And it will benefit you “middle class” people by giving you nice, middle class manufacturing jobs (since you were too stupid to stay in college) to make all those solar panels and wind mills. Doesn’t the brilliance of The One just dazzle you?
The really interesting part of Messrs. Podesta and Steyer’s op-ed are the responses to it. Be sure to read them here: A Badly Distorted Discourse on U.S. Energy Policy.
Al Gore was in the room when the internet was born, thus HE invented it. He didn’t even own a calculator at the time nor did he know how to use one (and probably still don’t-Limo Liberal like him have people for to do that. Obama has pandered to every Enviro group known to man and stopped a pipeline that is slated to created over 6K jobs and keep North American oil on the continent. That was him showing progress in Job creation and energy independence. He is just taking credit for something he can point at- The lemming liberals will believe anything their savior savior says. Truth he had the Congress and the Senate for 2 years of his presidency and the only thing he passed was Obama Care which will be repealed in the next presidency. He is Useless!!!!!
You must have gone off your meds. Such a ridiculous , logic challenged rant is in the Twilight Zone of paranoia.
just a little bitter huh. Who cares who does it, as long as it gets done!
Exdent did my facts offend you. Sorry if you’re offended but facts are facts-logical enough for you?. Here are a few more. But first let me give you a little background on how the country works. When a Democrat President has a Democrat Congess and Senate he should be UNSTOPABLE with any legislation or program he presents to the 2 legislative bodies. President Obama wasted the first 14 months of his presidency lobbying and working on Obama Care. During that time unemployment went UP, The National Credit Rating was DOWNGRADED and he incurred another 4+ TRILLION in debt. During said time (you can read the transcripts from his SOTUs 2009 and 2010 or just watch them on youtube) where he said virtually the same thing about home grown energy with the emphasis on greener energy and enacted nothing, nada, zero zip, zilch, in regards to drilling for NG. What makes you think he will pass any legislation or develop any program while he is a lame duck president for the next 12 months?. So, I guess it is the fact he has accomplished NOTHING in his 3 years but blame his predecessor (he even did it again in his SOTU 2011-absolutely laughable) for the state of the Nation, has made me a little nutty.
Now, if you don’t mind I have to get back to the Twilight Zone marathon on SiFi channel and Nurse Ratchet is here with my meds.
@Kenny – to answer your question.- I care. Up to now, nothing has been done. When given the chance to create 6K jobs and keep North American oil on our soil, he shot it down. He talks a great game, but never leaves the locker room. That’s my point.
You have an appalling lack of understanding of the power of the President. Even if you count three wobbly democratic senators , President Obama seldom had more than 59 committed votes in the Senate which meant the Republicans could stop most of his legislative proposals from coming to a vote[ it took three republican senator’s vote to pass the stimulus and the republican leader Mitch McConnell never let it happen again].
The Republicans used cloture and delay to prevent many proposed programs to reduce unemployment.Their goal was and is to delay improvement in the economy until Obama is defeated.
Obama faced a avalanche of Job destruction in the first 6 months of 2009 [ 2 million] before any of his inititives could begin [not to mention two wars to manage, the banking crisis, the car industry meltdown ,and a systemic yearly deficit over a trillion$ from President Bush ]. Lessons from the Great Depression were used as guidance. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon as late as 1930, told Hoover to do nothing: ” It will purge the rottenness out of the system….and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people. ” Obviously that was not the road to follow..
President Obama chose the Keynsian approach that dictates emergency spending to prevent the downward spiral of job losses, less consumer spending, more jobs losses , etc. One third of the stimulus was tax cuts, one third was support for state governments and one third was spent on developing new industries and infrastructure. Without this emergency spending a case can be made that several million more people would have lost their jobs and the lack of taxes they would have paid [ federal revenue] would have led to as great a deficit as we now have but with less potential for recovery.
Since the third quarter of 2009 we have slowly increased job growth from a terrible hole and the last few monthly jobs growth [ 23
Sorry, got cut off checking a fact . What I wanted to say in closing was this January’s’ jobs creation number was much better than expected at 243,000 and Nov. and Dec. were revised upward. Make no mistake, I believe the national debt is a serious problem that will be addressed once Obama is reelected. Oh, on green energy , 98% of the Dept. of Energy’s portfolio is doing just fine thank you very much; solar energy is getting more efficient and dramatically cheaper. It was over a 2 billion net $ export business in 2011.In less than 10 years wind and solar will be at parity with coal without subsidies. Listen to the Republican naysayers and we will be going back to the horse and buggy days. And yes , Obama is supporting natural gas development; he needs all the growth it affords to get us out of the hole Bush got us into.