Fred Barnes writes a good article in todays Weekly Standard about the excuses Democrats give nowadays for their opposition to new drilling for oil:
BARACK OBAMA PUNCTUATED his opposition last week to offshore drilling for oil and natural gas with a clever jab at John McCain. “The politics may have changed, but the facts have not,” he quipped. A few days earlier, McCain had called for lifting the moratorium on exploration and drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
Obama was only half right. With gasoline at $4-plus a gallon, the politics have indeed changed–in favor of increased domestic oil production. But so have the facts. And it’s that change that has made offshore drilling cost-effective, environmentally safe, and no threat to become an eyesore off the beaches of California and Florida.
Advances in oil technology–which Obama either doesn’t know about or chooses to ignore–allow drilling to go far deeper beneath the sea and thus farther from the coast. Some oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are nearly 200 miles from land. Serious spills from drilling offshore have become practically non-existent. More than 100 rigs in the Gulf were damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single spill.
~~~House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week that the Democratic Congress is “moving America in a new direction for energy independence.” But preserving the ban on offshore drilling isn’t new. The ban has been in effect since 1981, but Pelosi said it’s not responsible for high gasoline prices. Who’s really to blame? The Bush administration and the oil companies, she said.
Pelosi’s most implausible claim is that energy companies are hoarding oil. If so, they’re doing this as gasoline prices have reached a record high price. And these companies are the same ones that Democrats accuse of being greedy and reaping “obscene profits.”
Hoarding oil–keeping it off the market–certainly makes no economic sense, which is why oil companies aren’t doing it. As supposed evidence, Democrats cite the absence of drilling in 68 million acres of federal oil reserves leased by oil companies. In truth, these areas are under active exploration that may lead to drilling. Drilling, of course, is the last step in oil production. Whatever Democrats may think, oil companies don’t drill first, then explore later to find if drilling is actually worthwhile.
~~~Democrats have also turned to several hardy perennials, claiming that gouging and “excessive speculation” are chiefly at fault for the rise in the price of gasoline. These charges were aired during the 1970s and found to be false. But there’s a new twist this time: the House authorized lawsuits against OPEC, the oil cartel, for price fixing. This tactic is unlikely to be pursued.
Found to be false then, and will be found to be false now. But that hardly matters because its only the message that matters. Just as the Bush critics have spent years sending the message about Iraq being only about WMD, and that no WMD was found (both charges found to be false), the message still pervades American society. Doesn’t matter if its false, urban legends are like that. The American public knows the stats of their favorite sports star inside and out, or all about the marriage turmoil of their favorite Hollywood starlet, but ask them their knowledge of world events and their eyes glaze over.
The MSM says its big oil fault, and it becomes so.
To add fuel to the fire they put the nuttiest people up on the nightly news to screech about man-made global warming and the doom of the planet, all the fault of big oil of course, which people eat up. Take for example the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hanson, who was behind the recent cooking of books to prove man-made global warming. He now says big oil should be charged with crimes against humanity.
You think I’m kidding? (h/t Newsbusters)
James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.
~~~Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.
In an interview with the Guardian he said: “When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that’s a crime.”
He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen’s speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public’s attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding “it is time to stop waffling”.
20 years ago he said the planet was doomed. 20 years later and he still says it is as he fudges the numbers in his studies and growing evidence that the planet is cooling.
Democrats, wrong then…wrong now.
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