06-02-2010, 07:09 AM
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#294 (permalink)
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Junkie
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From your neighborhood capitalist.
I have an agenda, which is to increase domestic oil production to feed business growth and expansion in this country as we transition to increased use of non-fossil fuels. What I post supports my agenda.
From IBD editorial pages today:
Quote:
Energy Policy: To save the environment, a senator from Pennsylvania wants to shut off a major source of natural gas. Weren't the roads to the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters paved with equally good intentions?
Environmentalism did not cause the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, but it did help make it possible, just as 1989's Exxon Valdez disaster, which the Gulf Oil spill has now eclipsed, was also ironically made possible by a desire to protect the environment.
The original plan when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope was to build a pipeline directly to the northern border of the 48 contiguous states. Groups like the Sierra Club waged a major battle against both the Prudhoe Bay development and the pipeline.
They lost on the drilling but won a small victory in forcing the pipeline to not traverse the continent via a safer land route but to dead end at the port of Valdez, Alaska. The rest, as they say, is history.
Had the oil companies gotten their way, there would have been no tanker to be run aground by its captain on March 24, 1989, causing 10.8 million gallons of crude oil to be dumped into Alaskan waters.
On Sunday's "Meet The Press," NBC's David Gregory asked if environmental zeal might have also contributed to Deepwater Horizon. "Is the problem that we're drilling in water that's just too deep?" he asked Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy and former EPA administrator in the Clinton administration.
"Should you even rethink your own approach to the environment to say, 'Maybe in the Arctic Wildlife Reserve, we ought to be drilling there. We ought to be going into shallower waters so that this can be done more safely?'"
Browner tap-danced around the question by saying it was one of the things to think about while we shut down the domestic oil industry. Browner et al. should indeed think about the fact that if British Petroleum and others were not barred from drilling in ANWR or in the shallower water of the Outer Continental Shelf, we might not be having this conversation.
Out west we may have what could be called a "Persia on the Plains." A Rand Corp. study says the Green River Formation covering parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming has the largest known oil shale deposits in the world, holding from 1.5 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil. It's all on dry land, but it's all locked up by federal edict.
Environmentalists, aided and abetted by Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, now want to stop us from unlocking our vast reserves of natural gas locked up in shale using a technique called hydraulic fracturing or "fracking." The technique involves injecting liquids under pressure, 95% of which is water, into the shale rock to release the trapped gas.
Casey has introduced legislation to remove fracking's long-standing exemption in the Safe Drinking Water Act that allows energy companies to use the process. He claims the process endangers America's drinking water, though fracking is done thousands of feet below the groundwater table and there's never been a case of groundwater contamination caused by fracking.
"This 60-year-old technique has been responsible for 7 billion barrels of oil and 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas," according to Sen. James Inhofe, ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. "In hydraulic fracturing's 60-year-history, there has not been a single documented case of contamination."
Casey's Pennsylvania contains a major portion of the Marcellus Shale Formation covering 34 million acres in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and Kentucky. SUNY-Fredonia geologist Gary Lash and colleague Terry Engelder of Penn State estimate that Marcellus holds 1,300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Those who would ban fracking also need to consider that if oil companies rather than environmentalists were allowed to decide how to drill for and deliver oil, neither the Exxon Valdez nor the Deepwater Horizon spills need to have happened.
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Environmentalists Also To Blame For Exxon Valdez And Gulf Spills - IBD - Investors.com
There are consequences to actions taken - environmentalists should reflect on their strategy considering the current disaster.
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"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."
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