Environmentalists to Blame for Higher Gas Prices
Hidden from public view by a media that prefers to blame oil companies for the rapid increase in oil and gas prices is another cause — Democrats’ purist environmental policies. George Will highlights this in an excellent summary today in the Wall Street Journal.In 1995, critics of drilling in the ANWR region of northern Alaska insisted that it wasn’t worth it to risk the beauty of that vast wildlife area for oil that would not be available for ten year anyway. Thirteen years later, the ten-year timeframe that made relief from new supplies it appear distant in 1995 is a rhetorical albatross hanging around environmentalists’ necks. This is exacerbated by the grotesqueness of their exaggerations of the environmental impact, since the amount of ANWR that would actually be impacted by drilling is tiny. Environmentalists have used similar exaggerations to place off-limits more than 85% of all U.S. offshore areas, containing supplies that could not only reduce prices, but could give the U.S. breathing space to decrease its reliance on politically unstable foreign sources while turning more enthusiastically to the practical development of alternative energy technologies.
An additional factor leading to high gas prices is also linked to environmentalists. The U.S. has not built new refineries since the 1970s. Thus, the aging refining infrastructure results in frequent gasoline shortages even when oil supplies are doing well. The reason that new refineries are not being built is the crippling litigation and liability costs imposed on any company who might want to try to build a refinery by environmentalist purists who are privileged with personal lifestyles that allow them not to suffer from high gas prices even as they saddle working-class commuters with spiraling costs.
Since the sympathetic media always gives a pass to environmentalists, we can expect little political pressure to focus on them to reverse their destructive and elitist influence, however. It is likely that even as gasoline prices continue to accelerate upward, the Democratic-contolled Congress will show little interest in addressing the actual problems and plenty of interest in new Kafka-esque show-trials of oil company executives.
Are you willing to accept an ever declining lifestyle? Choose: FOREIGN WARS OR DOMESTIC OIL A rapidly devaluing dollar, aggravated by the cost of the War in Iraq, contributes to recent rapid increases in the price of gas. And if the trillion plus dollars the US spent fighting that war had been invested in a Manhattan like project to produce oil from known reserves in the Gulf of Mexico, the Continental shelf and synthetic diesel/gas from America’s abundant coal fields, gas would be $2 a gallon or less. And reducing trade deficits keeps jobs in America. Every billion of trade deficit costs 13,000 jobs. $400 billion for oil last year: do the math. Plus declaring American energy independence is the neighborly thing to do. It would place downward pressure on world oil prices by making more OPEC oil available for the UK, France, Japan, Turkey, etc. Harness your anger at the pump. Call Congress and demand domestic production in this decade. Raise your voice or the oil companies and politicians will assume you are ready to pay even more. http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW_by_State.shtml
Let the oil stay underground as a last resort while you try to remove your dependence on it. If your society can’t be bothered to ween off from a resource that has been proven to fluctuate so much in price then perhaps those sly elitists are the least of your concerns.