Obama’s Oil Drilling Con

Below is a brief excerpt from today’s WSJ Print Edition that I wanted to post to tie into a post of mine from several days ago. I said that any Obama proposal on offshore drilling must be put under a microscope to see if any of the details have any nasty surprises and….SURPRISE, SUPRISE!! here they are.

~~John Cronin~~

….yesterday’s proposal had the net effect of puting some 13 billion barrels of oil and 41 trillion cu. ft. of gas under lock and key, in return for blessing a few leases already underway.  It is a measure of today’s environmental extremism that even these minor steps were denounced as betrayals.  “Is this President Obama’s clean energy plan or [Sarah] Palin’s……campaign?’ said Greenpeace.  Give Obama credit at least for resisting these anit-drilling absolutists.

The larger politics here is that Mr. Obama is hoping these drilling bits will sway Republicans to vote for his “comprehensive energy and climate bill”—AKA cap and tax.  So even as the Administration allows more homegrown oil exploration, it still wants to raise the price of carbon energy so ethanol, wind and the like have a chance to be competitive. With yesterday’s small favors, Republican who make that trade would be selling themselves cheap.

Read more at WSJ