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Jewish World Review March 20 , 2012/ 26 Adar, 5772 Obama's gusher of lies By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
As gasoline prices soar, President Barack Obama's poll numbers fall. The president is unwilling to change his policies, so he's cramming more lies into his speeches.
At a community college in Maryland last week, the kids hooted when the president derided Republicans as "members of the Flat Earth Society" for opposing his "investments" of taxpayer money in "green" energy.
"One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, 'It's a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?' Mr. Obama said.
Hayes, who brought the first telephone and the first typewriter to the White House, never said that, fact checkers noted.
"If you start hearing this 'drill, baby drill' -- we're doing that," Mr. Obama said.
Oil production on public lands has declined 8 percent during the Obama presidency, according to the Energy Information Administration. Leases to drill on federal lands in the West are down 44 percent. The time it takes to get a permit to drill in the Gulf of Mexico has nearly doubled.
"If we drilled every square inch of this country...we'd still have only 2 percent of the world's known oil reserves," Mr. Obama said.
"This is a lowball figure that does not begin to describe the oil known to be within the U.S. borders," noted Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler. That's because oil in places the government has declared off limits doesn't count.
Change those laws and regulations, and reserves soar. We have about 22 billion barrels of oil in our "reserves," the EIA estimates -- but 140 billion barrels of "undiscovered technically recoverable oil." When oil shale is included, the U.S. has 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable oil -- enough to meet our needs for 200 years, says the Institute for Energy Research.
Canada has a lot of oil, too. When President Obama cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline, he denied us about 1.4 million barrels of that oil a day.
"There's no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to high gas prices," Mr. Obama said.
Oil prices dropped $2 a barrel within hours last week upon a rumor that oil would be released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This suggests prices could drop quickly if more areas were opened to exploration.
So does history. Ronald Reagan's first executive order ended price controls on gasoline. Gas lines disappeared overnight. The price of gas (adjusted for inflation) declined 14 percent his first year, 50 percent by the end of his presidency.
Mr. Obama is hamstringing production of oil and natural gas, says the American Petroleum Institute. New EPA regulations could cut domestic oil production up to 37 percent.
The president wants higher fossil fuel prices to make "green" technologies seem affordable. But the massive "investments" he's made have created more scandal than energy. ABC News described the pattern in an investigative report March 5: "Green Firms Get Fed Cash, Give Execs Bonuses, Fail."
The poster child for green fail is Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer which filed for bankruptcy after receiving $535 million in loan guarantees. The FBI is investigating for fraud.
Mindful of the bad publicity his earlier "investments" generated, Mr. Obama now touts a new wonder biofuel.
Algae could replace 17 percent of the oil we use, the president said. Scientists say there isn't enough sunlight to make biofuel from it on so massive a scale, and algae uses too much water (350 gallons for each gallon of biofuel) and too much land (it would take an area the size of South Carolina to meet the president's goal).
And for a boutique fuel, biofuel from algae is very, very expensive. The Navy paid Solazyme $425 a gallon for 20,000 gallons of an algae-based biofuel. Solazyme also got a $21.9 million government loan. Solazyme's management -- like that of most of the firms which received subsidies -- has strong ties to the Democratic party. This could be another "Solyndra situation," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
"After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels — which we possess in staggering abundance — that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live," said columnist Charles Krauthammer.
And each time he makes a speech, his nose grows longer.
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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.
© 2011, Jack Kelly |
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