Obama's dirty little (energy) secret

Why are gasoline prices so high? Now that the election campaign is on, the president speaks almost daily about his determination to lower gas prices, but let’s look at the record. Gasoline prices were $1.90/gal. when he took office with promises he would free America from dependency upon OPEC. The Arab oil racket drains $400 billion/year from American taxpayers. Yet now, it is $3.80/gal, exactly double, and it is not hard to see why, when we see what steps Barack Obama took to raise the price of gas and oil.

What he said and says, and what he did, are polar opposites:

1. The most important person to determine energy costs would be his choice for energy secretary. He chose Steven Chu, an academic who was specifically on record in support of raising domestic gas prices to Europe’s much higher prices (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/73138.html).

2. While Obama shut down all our rigs in the Gulf of Mexico from domestic well drilling, he offered no objection to the Government’s Export-Import Bank simultaneously approving a $2 billion loan to Brazil to drill much deeper wells off their coast, which oil was contracted to go to China (http://cnsnews.com/news/article/senator-questions-2-billion-loan-brazil-offshore-drilling-domestic-production, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-03/u-s-administration-in-contempt-over-gulf-drill-ban-judge-rules.html).

3. The Inspector General’s Office discovered that the Obama administration report assuring that the expert panel reviewing his ban on drilling supported the ban, was, in fact, a fraud, and that the expert panel’s findings did not support the ban on drilling (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44921.html).

4. Obama shut down the Keystone Pipeline, a major jobs and energy project which would have Canadian oil supplant Venezuelan oil at refineries in Texas and Louisiana, risking instead that it might go to China. In fact, our long-time ally, Canada, is so frustrated and fed up with this decision, they are now building a new pipeline through British Columbia to their West Coast so that all that oil which could have stayed here, can now go to China (http://www.northerngateway.ca/project-details/project-at-a-glance/).

5. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has filed numerous new and continuing actions against efforts to drill for oil and gas domestically from coast to coast, and has virtually halted drilling on federal lands (http://www.frackinginsider.com/regulatory/when-one-thinks-of-a/)

6. Obama has stopped offshore drilling in the East and South while China and Cuba drill in waters off Florida (http://www.npr.org/2011/09/12/140405282/cuban-offshore-drilling-plans-raise-u-s-concerns).

7. Obama’s EPA blocked Shell Oil from efforts to drill off Alaska despite years of waiting for permits (http://blog.heritage.org/2011/04/25/epa-blocks-oil-drilling-in-alaska/)

8. Despite the fact that coal-fired plants account for 42 percent of all domestic energy plants in our country, Obama has proposed new regulations designed to shut down up to half our coal-fired domestic energy plants and already shut down six major coal-fired energy plants in the U.S. The East Coast blackouts can be directly attributed to this forced curtailment of domestic energy plants (http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/12/19/3606472/ new-epa-rules-expected-to-cause.html).

9. A top Obama EPA official was caught on tape saying the philosophy of Obama’s EPA is to “crucify” oil and gas companies (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/04/26/epa_official_says_philosophy_is_to_crucify_oil_and_gas_companies.html).

10. Obama daily attacks our domestic oil and gas companies, threatening much higher taxes on the companies. Higher taxes, of course, lead to less money to discover oil and gas, and raise retail prices further to pay for the additional taxes. According to the Energy Information Administration, over the past 20 years, energy companies paid more taxes to the government than they earned for their shareholders, and paid an average tax rate of 41.1 percent vs. 26.5 percent tax paid by the 500 largest companies in the U.S. Why are oil companies singled out for paying 41 percent taxes, but not Apple, which only pays 8 percent federal taxes (http://www.api.org/statistics/earnings/upload/earnings_perspective.pdf)?

When Barack Obama’s policies are clearly and purposely curtailing new domestic energy sources, thereby increasing OPEC imports, prices go up. Why does he want consumers to pay much more for heating their homes and driving to work? Answer: Unless he can drive fossil fuel prices much higher, his far more expensive “green energy” will fail, though “green energy” still only accounts for less than 3 percent of domestic energy production..

Finally, if you still can’t believe that our president is purposely driving the average citizen’s energy prices higher, listen to him yourself in an interview he gave in San Francisco in 2009 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4), where he says, “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

In the meanwhile, the voting public remains uninformed, as Obama campaigns on lowering energy prices, confident that his Mainstream Media allies will not report his dirty little secret. Is it too much to ask that our president tell us the truth?

Chickering is a resident of Whitefish.