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 Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.
The mans an idiot. A shrewd idiot…but an idiot all the same.
Just how you plan to decrease imports when there is NOTHING………ZIP……..ZILCH……….NADA to take its place is just mindboggling.
But of course its all about the multibillion dollar green industry run by the green billionaires that continue to pound this.
They cannot compete with oil unless oil becomes so expensive as to make their alternatives attractive.
That is what obama is doing..he is purposely driving up oil prices while pretending to be battling it and blaming it on the arabs and republicans.
He is one shrewd dood…..an idiot…but shrood.
Did you not read the article? It says there will more invested in biofuels and electric vehicles. What else could possibly take the place of oil? The main reason behind all the turmoil in the Middle East is oil. The only solution to the problem is to cut our dependency on oil, period. In the following years oil will become more expensive, so rather than wait for it to skyrocket and burn all this money on trying to pay for that oil, how about we put it towards researching alternatives?
We passed ‘peak production’ in the 1970s. Meaning we will never be able to produce the amounts of oil we did in the 1970s. Time to plan ahead.
I’d like to see anyone come up with a better plan with the options Obama has to work with. All I see is complaints.
Good points. Obama wants oil and energy to be expensive, and he wants to reward his donors with expensive government contracts that produce little to nothing.
Thats a relief, he has a plan. I thought we were in trouble. Bull by any other name is still bull.
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[…] With Oil Prices Rising, Obama Looks To….Reduce Imports! 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. […]
Having spent about 40 years in the “awl” bidness along with a family who has been in the “awl” bidness since the turn of the century I can tell you that production or peak oil is an illusion.
Once oil became big business and controlled by stock holders it was necessary to produce oil at a reasonable rate based upon value to stock holders.
Stock holders dont take kindly to running up the prices of their stock and then having the stock collapse cause your not making any money cause you done pumped all the oil reserves your sitting on out of the ground.
For example…If you have 10 barrels of oil in reserve, while you are working to develop more reserves then you anticipate that the 5 more barrels of oil that you might be able to recover in 5 years means that you need to produce a consistent amount of oil from your 10 bbls of KNOWN reserves….
Hence you pump out 1 gallon per day for the next 5 years…rather then 10 gallons per day then sit for 4 years with nothing to pump and to produce revenue…
Truthers call it peak oil…those of us in the oil business call it common sense.
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The long-term fuel-savings strategies sound promising but it is difficult to say if they would work. The only thing that might help solve the energy problems of the US is natural gas. The country is rich in it and the most important thing is – it is really cheap.
Doomed is right…. and then we also find more oil all the time. And amazing enough too… those fields that went dry, sometimes they come back to life.
But what gets me, and I am really shockingly surprised that you didn’t catch this Teach,… is that Mr. Awesome just came back from Brazil promising them to give them lots of money to drill for oil and promising them to buy more of their oil.
This man is a lying hypocritical slimy scumbag.
Kills our country while propping up terrorists, thugs, and fascists.