The price of gasoline as reached a national average of $4 a gallon. People are hurting and they want someone to do something. Unfortunately, the time to do something that would have helped today, is long past.
Drilling for oil in AWAR, for instance has been stalemated by Democrats since 1987 when it was first brought up in Congress
Energy Bill authorized drilling in ANWR, but a filibuster by Senate Democrats kept the measure from coming to a vote. In 1995, Republicans prepared to take up the battle again and included a provision for ANWR in the federal budget. President Bill Clinton vetoed the entire budget and expressed his intention to veto any other bill that would open ANWR to drilling...
The House of Representatives voted in mid-2000 to allow drilling. In April 2002, the Senate rejected it.
It was brought up again in the 2005 Energy Bill and passed the Republican controlled House, but the provision for opening up ANWAR for drilling was stripped from the Senate version by Democrats.
Back in 1991, Peter Nulty writing for Forbes magazine wrote
A small corner of it represents America's best chance of discovering major new oil reserves. Geology even hints that within the refuge lies a rare opportunity to uncover Saudi Arabia-size oil fields. The chance is minuscule, but a chance nonetheless. And the stakes are huge: If major reserves turn up, they could in the long run hobble OPEC, substantially improve America's balance of payments, and make the U.S. more energy independent.
Oh well. So too any thought of drilling off-shore has been similarly stymied.
Despite talk of an energy crisis and the need for independence from foreign oil, Congress seems to be in no mood to open more of the country's coastal waters to energy development.
The House late Thursday rejected an attempt to end the quarter-century ban on oil and natural gas drilling that has been in effect for 85 percent of the country's coastal waters from Alaska to New England despite arguments that new supplies are needed to lower energy costs.
Lawmakers from Florida and California, who led the fight to continue the drilling moratorium, said they feared energy projects as close as three miles from shore could jeopardize multibillion-dollar tourism industries in their states.
"People don't go to visit the coasts of Florida or the coast of California to watch oil wells," Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., said.
And most recently, shale oil locked on government lands has also been made untouchable
Last month, the U.S. Senate's Appropriations Committee voted 15-14 to kill a bill that would have ended a one-year moratorium on enacting rules for oil shale development on federal lands (which is where the best oil shale is located). Most maddening of all - at least to someone like myself not steeped in the wacky ways of Washington - the swing vote on the appropriations committee, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., voted with the majority even though she actually opposes the moratorium.
"Sen. Salazar asked me to vote no. I did so at his request," Landrieu told The Rocky Mountain News.
As a result, the President has had to go hat in hand to Saudi Arabia to ask them to open the spigots.
We want Saudi Arabia, a fairweather friend at best, to do what we will not.
In fact, most of the oil producing countries are either enemies of the US or support enemies of the US. And higher oil prices just aids our enemies.
But it seems the Democratic Leadership is good at that.
And it is not just that our enemies benefit from our pain that's a problem. The big problem is that our Islamist enemies are exacerbating the problem deliberately in order to try to win a strategic victory.
Yes, a solution is using less oil and gas. But it is only a partial solution. Even if we do not always need oil, the rest of the world will. And it will always be a point of contention no matter what.
We need to be able to better control the supply of oil and to do that we need to produce more of it. Because we can and because it is within our power to do so and thus be better able to control our own destiny.
While we fail to do this, we have no one to blame for high oil and gas prices but ourselves.
