American Elephants

You may have noticed that President Obama’s speeches often come with an expiration date, which is sometimes the next day. He’s good with the teleprompter, but has trouble with facts. In the debates just before the election, he rounded on Gov. Romney for claiming that government lands were not producing oil and gas. He claimed that his administration had opened up public lands and we’re actually producing more than the previous administration, and the previous president was an oil man. “Natural gas isn’t just appearing magically,” he said.

A new Congressional Research Service report states that oil production on federal lands  has fallen by 23% in the last two years, and natural gas production has dropped by 33%. The  president is responsible for not one drop of increased oil and gas production. The increases are all from private lands. It’s important to understand the American people’s real energy situation. It makes a difference in the price of gas at the pump. It makes a difference in the cost of electricity, for some of our power plants are natural gas fired.  It makes a difference in Obama’s efforts to force a green energy regime on the country, and it makes a difference in taxpayer money poured into useless schemes.

In the wake of Deepwater Horizon, the administration put a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf. When the moratorium was finally “lifted”after bankrupting many businesses in the Gulf region, they installed a “permitorium” slowing and making impossible efforts to drill. They removed areas that were available for oil leases, took areas off-line, and placed extensive restrictions on where it was possible to drill for oil.  The entire East coast became unavailable for drilling, but quite available for offshore wind turbines.

Obama is still wedded to his primary victory rhetoric “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal.” But it turns out that the oceans are not rising but a millimeter a year, and the planet is doing nicely and does not need healing. Human produced CO2 is not the cause of global warming, and the globe is not warming, nor has it warmed for nearly 20 years……………………..(click to enlarge)

All those valiant efforts to keep us from producing any carbon dioxide — the windmills, the solar arrays, the green biodiesel that’s supposed to run the Navy, but isn’t produced in any quantity yet, the electric cars, ethanol, it was all a lie, and all the billions spent were simply a waste and a fraud. Al Gore is not now and never was a climate scientist. And the fact is that most of the subsidies for producing all these green wonders went to cronies and campaign contributors.

Obama just ordered that all federal agencies cannot approve any major projects — from pipelines to highways — until they have considered the impact on global warming. Obama plans to “expand the scope of a Nixon-era law,” the National Environmental Policy Act, “that was first intended to force agencies to asses effect of projects on air, water and soil pollution.” If Congress won’t pass the laws he wants, — in this case passing a carbon tax —then Obama will just make law on his own without all that constitutional bother.

Ross Eisberg, vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, told Bloomberg that Obama’s proposal has “got us very freaked out.”

They were always wrong about carbon dioxide. It’s what we breathe out, and it makes plants grow. It is greening the earth as Matt Ridley explained at some length in this video. There has been way more CO2 in the atmosphere in the past, we are at kind of a low point, and if it increases more, so will our forests.

That’s the trouble with ideology, you fall in love with certain ideas, and close your mind to anything that does not agree with your treasured ideas. You can’t speak about how important creating more jobs is to you, and then do everything you can to shut down the possibility of growth. At some point you have to get off the merry-go-round and walk on.