Obama's Endless Energy Lies

By Alan Caruba

For anyone who follows energy issues, the President’s press conference on Friday was a breathtaking example of his ability and willingness to lie about America’s energy needs and reserves while obfuscating his administration’s relentless attacks on the nation’s coal and oil industries.

Even if we give Obama the benefit of the doubt by saying he is being “misinformed” by advisors, it does not alter the fact that he has, since the days of his campaign in 2008, made no secret of his intention to undermine America’s oil and coal industries while encouraging greater use of the two forms of energy, wind and solar power, that are of the least value in the real world. Neither would exist without massive tax incentives and subsidies or mandates that require their use.

Obama’s lies are so easily refuted one might think he would hesitate to tell them, but he is undeterred by the truth.

Claims that his administration is approving drilling permits were disputed by the Governor of Alaska, Sean Parnell, in a March 3rd Wall Street Journal editorial. “…Alaska and the Gulf states have been blocked from developing America’s oil by politically driven federal policy…In Alaska, an oil company can buy federal leases, spend over $3 billion in permitting and capital costs, apply for an air permit from the Environmental Protection Agency, and then wait for five years and still have no permit.”

Obama’s claim that his administration is looking at oil leases that have not been developed into drilling sites obscures the fact that, despite billions invested in them by companies prepared to explore and extract oil, his administration has pursued a policy of stalling such efforts.

His claim that America has only two percent of the proven oil reserves of the world’s oil is just a flat-out lie. The Congressional Research Service recently released a report asserting that the U.S. has at least 17 percent of the world’s oil. And that is just the amount known to exist domestically and offshore.

In a March 11th statement by Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research said that “The CRS found that there is likely to be a combined 164.1 billion barrels or 8.5 times as much as the president alleges.”

It is Obama whose policies are driving up the cost of a gallon of gas at the pump. When one considers that U.S. oil is always cheaper per barrel than imported oil, Americans are being robbed, not by oil companies, but by White House restrictions on oil production.

This is a President who, in January 2008, campaigning for the office, told the San Francisco Chronicle that his cap-and-trade plan would cause electricity rates to “necessarily skyrocket.” The Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, told the Wall Street Journal that same year that “Somehow, we have to figure out how to boast the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe” which was paying $10 a gallon!

The Obama energy plan is devoted to bankrupting Americans and bankrupting America.

As Nansen G. Saler, president and CEO of Quantum Reservoir Impact, Houston, asked in a March 9th Wall Street Journal commentary, “How do we go from where we are today—importing about 20% of our daily energy supply—to where we want to be in 2026, perhaps even (as) an energy exporter?”

Imagine that? The U.S. as an energy exporter? Imagine the thousands of jobs that represents? Imagine the revenue that represents to a nation in its present financial crisis? Imagine the savings at the pump?

In 1960, the writer Mary McCarthy was being interviewed by Dick Cavett and was asked which writers she thought were over-rated. She named three, one of whom was Lillian Hellman, a well known Communist sympathizer. McCarthy replied that “everything she writes is a lie, including the ‘and’ and ‘the.’ It sparked a great literary controversy, but I was reminded of it while listening to Obama.

This President, blathering about “energy efficiency”, electric cars, high speed trains, thousands of acres covered by wind turbines and solar farms, and all the other pipedreams that represent a Green agenda, is deliberately misleading Americans while his administration, instead of “winning the future”, is killing the future for America..

© Alan Caruba, 2011