President Bush Asks Congress To Lift Ban On Offshore Drilling, Dems Are Opposed To Lower Oil Prices

If only President Bush had been more forceful on this issue two or more years ago before the Dems took control of both houses of Congress. It would have been much less of a fight and oil and gasoline prices wouldn't be where they are today, at least not for American citizens.

But the Dems are opposed to giving any kind of relief to Americans who are hurting because of high energy prices. In fact, their response was pretty much the same-old same-old that they are being told to give by the radical environmentalists who control them.

From CNN:

President Bush asked Congress on Wednesday to permit drilling for oil in deep water off America's coasts to combat rising oil and gas prices. "There is no excuse for delay," the president said in a Rose Garden statement. ... Bush also renewed his demand that Congress allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, clear the way for more refineries and encourage efforts to recover oil from shale in areas such as the Green River Basin of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Bush said that the basin potentially contains more than three times as much recoverable oil as Saudi Arabia's proven reserves and that the high price of oil makes it profitable to extract it.

Of course, the Dems, who seem to be completely ignorant of economic reality are opposed to any of this. Liberal Dem Bill Richardson of New Mexico made the wild claim that gas prices wouldn't be affected for 30 years, although the Saudis and other oil producing nations know that the global price of oil can be brought down in less than one year after drilling operations commence. I should also note that CNN made no effort whatsoever to impart this latter information to their audience.

But here is something very interesting that was part of a sidebar of the CNN article:

Oil Production Cost Here's what the price of a barrel of oil needs to be for different sources of petroleum to be profitably extracted: - Accessible land: $19 - Shallow water: $20-60 - Deep water: $60 - Shale mining: $30-50 - Oil sands: $50-60 Current price per barrel: $134 Sources: U.S. Govt. CERA, Rand, EnCana

With numbers like that, it becomes clear that Bill Richardson has no understanding of economics whatsoever and was merely parroting what he was told to parrot by the greens. With costs being cut in half, it would be only months before world oil prices began feeling the deflationary effect of increased American domestic production. That would be good for Americans.

But in press releases after the President's call for lifting the ban, the Dems were quick to reject it, although they used canned responses and made wild accusations with nothing to back them. Here is one example of their pathetic statements:

"After eight years, President Bush and [Vice President] Dick Cheney have turned the GOP into the Gas and Oil Party. That's the legacy that they are going to leave," said Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. "The White House has become a ventriloquist for the oil and gas industry, repeating the requests of the oil and gas industry."

No substance. No data to back it up. No understanding of economics. Just flurry of insults from a mouthpiece for the radical greens.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Bush Asks Congress To Clear Way For Offshore Oil Drilling
Ed Henry, Richard Greene, Brianna Keilar, Hussein Saddique and Ali Velshi
CNN.com
June 19, 2008