President Obama this week announced that his administration would ease-up on the long moratorium on offshore drilling for oil and natural gas.  Congress may not have made up its collective mind on the issue but some in the American media have made their positions clear.  Observe if you will this headline from the April 1 edition of the Miami Herald:

Obama offshore drilling plan spares South Florida

Here’s a parallel line from a story on the website of KEYT-TV in Santa Barbara, California:

It looks as if California’s coastline was spared, as President Obama announced plans for renewed efforts of offshore oil exploration.

Without getting into the relative merits of the president’s proposal, my question is, from what exactly are these two states being spared?  It’s not as if ExxonMobil is planning to plop oil derricks along the strip in South Beach or adjacent to the millionaire mansions of Santa Barbara.  But what about the pristine scenery in these areas?

The drilling would not be permitted any closer than 125 miles from any shoreline, which is well into international waters. In fact, nobody would ever see the drilling platforms.  A person of average height can only see about three miles into the horizon and even folks in the tallest luxury hotels have a vista that extends maybe 25 or 30 miles tops.  No, wrecking the view isn’t something that folks are being spared from. (more…)

Juan Williams is the titular liberal on Fox News and he tries very hard to maintain the impression that the news panels are fair and balanced. To do that he routinely parrots the Democrat mantra du jour on all issues and ofn a recent Fox News Special Report he defended President Obama’s call for new energy policies and cited the need for the government to explore alternative means to reduce our dependency on foreign oil.

I’m a decade older than Williams so maybe he doesn’t recall the Carter administration as well as I do but the Department of Energy was established for that very same purpose and it has produced absolutely nothing towards that aim in over 32 years.

The energy crisis of 1973 was the impetus for President Carter to propose creation of the DOE and the enabling legislation was passed and signed into law on August 4, 1977. The DOE began operations on October 1, 1977.

On its website, this department lists all its awards and achievements but the fact is that hundreds of billions later with a budget of $24.2 billion a year, 16,000 federal employees and approximately 10,000 contract employees, we are no closer to being independent of foreign oil. That’s how a bureaucracy operates — it produces nothing except a mechanism to drain money from taxpayers. Now the banking, healthcare and auto industry are scheduled for the same ‘fix.” Heaven help us! (more…)

During his State of the Union address, President Obama tossed a couple of sops to popular opinion, promising to support: A) nuclear power, and B) offshore drilling. James Hudnall did a brilliant job of dismantling Obama’s atomic promises, pointing out that even if the President happened to be uncharacteristically sincere in this case, no new nuclear plant will be built in a dog’s lifetime, even if the pooch happens to one of those little yip-dogs that seem to live forever. Based on what we have seen of his administration so far, the same is true of Obama’s newfound commitment to offshore drilling.

Suspending reality for a moment, let’s assume that burning fossil fuels will indeed result in catastrophic climate change. According to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, “we can’t drill our way out” of this supposed problem.

Actually, we can.

Burning natural gas is a much less intensive carbon intensive way of generating energy than burning any other fossil fuel. There are a couple of reasons for this. When you burn coal, just about all of the energy generated comes from turning carbon into carbon dioxide (a chemical reaction that releases heat). When you burn natural gas, the energy comes from two reactions: one that turns carbon into carbon dioxide, and another that turns hydrogen in water. Thus, from the start, natural gas generates less greenhouse gases for the same amount of energy produced. (more…)