Not oil! In a Washington Post puff piece helping Speaker Nancy Pelosi sell her new book, “Know Your Power,” Pelosi is quoted: “The men had ruled the roost for such a long time, and they liked that environment. They had this attitude of, ‘We know how to get this done, and there’s a secret sauce to it.’ They never said it that way, but that’s how I heard it: ‘There’s a secret sauce, and you can’t possibly know the recipe because we do.’” Well it sure didn’t take long for …
Forget voting to lift a ban on offshore drilling; House Majority Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t having any of it. In fact, she won’t even let an offshore drilling debate hit the House floor. When asked why she was so adamantly opposed to offshore drilling she responded, “What the president would like to do is to have validation for his failed policy.” Is there any justification as to why it shouldn’t be debated? Currently 85% of the outer continental shelf is off-limits, and it holds an abundant amount of resources that …
Whenever conservatives push for developing more domestic energy, liberals respond by saying increased oil production, whether from the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) or Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), would have no effect on prices. And they always trot out the same Energy Information Administration reports predicting that opening up ANWR would decrease the price of a barrel of oil by only 41 cents by 2026. For liberals, such precise predictions of commodity prices decades from now only build faith in the government’s numbers. Conservatives know better. Conservatives know that if …
Today the U.S. has about 22 billion barrels of proven oil reserves that can be legally developed. Yesterday, President Bush lifted just one of the many roadblocks that stand between American consumers and the estimated 19.1 billion barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf that are currently off-limits from production. Bush’s rescinding of his father’s 1990 presidential directive restricting all new offshore exploration and drilling could almost double proven U.S. oil reserves. The next step is getting Congress on board. Beginning in 1982, Congress restricted more and more offshore areas …
President Bush has done his part and now it will be up to Congress to do theirs. President Bush is lifting an executive order restricting offshore continental shelf drilling, an order put in place by George H.W. Bush in 1990. President Bush said in this speech, “The only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil resources is action from the U.S. Congress.” The Heritage Foundation’s Ben Lieberman writes that OCS restrictions are a relic of the past; they were put in place to please environmentalists at a …
Pressed for space in today’s Morning Bell, we left out some of the more fascinating findings from that Pew poll showing how dramatically American opinion is shifting in favor of increased energy production. Pew reports: Much of the increase in support for energy exploration has come among groups that previously viewed this as a less important priority than energy conservation – young people, liberals, independents, Democrats, women and people who have attended college. Fully half of people ages 18 to 29 (51%) now say expanding energy exploration is a more …
Current Harvard economics professor and former chief economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan Martin Feldstein explains in the Wall Street Journal how announcing that the U.S. will allow oil development on currently banned lands, could lower oil prices right now: The relationship between future and current oil prices implies that an expected change in the future price of oil will have an immediate impact on the current price of oil. Thus, when oil producers concluded that the demand for oil in China and some other countries will grow more rapidly …
When it comes to environmental policy, we’ve documented the Center for American Progress’ penchant for distorting reality before. Now they are at it again, this time trying to prove that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is “unaware” that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused “major” offshore oil spills. Debating offshore oil drilling on Fox News, Jindal accurately said, “You know, that’s one of the great unwritten success stories, after Katrina and Rita, these awful storms, no major spills.” To rebut Jindal’s claims CAP links to a Minerals Management Service study that they …
When required to vote on an energy amendment that would have opened up the supply of resources to lower costs to the American consumer, Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee chose to walk rather than vote. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) and Rep. John Peterson (R-Pa.) called for lifting a 27-year ban on deep see exploration during the markup of the Labor-HHS-Education spending bill, but the markup quickly dissipated as senior Democrats chose to leave the room. House Republican Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) offered this statement: “Unfortunately, the millions of Americans struggling …
