The Patriot Post® · Oil, Jobs, and National Security

By Michael Oberndorf ·
https://patriotpost.us/commentary/14191-oil-jobs-and-national-security-2012-07-23

As promised, Doc Hastings (R-WA), along with my congressman, Jeff Landry (R-LA), and 22 other patriotic, America supporting members of the House Natural Resources Committee, passed H.R. 6082, The Congressional Replacement of President Obama’s Energy-Restricting and Job-Limiting Offshore Drilling Plan. As reported in the committee’s weekly newsletter:

H.R. 6082 would replace the Obama Administration’s final offshore drilling plan, which keeps 85 percent of America’s offshore areas off-limits to energy production, with a real plan that creates new American jobs by allowing offshore American energy production in those areas with the greatest known oil and natural gas resources. “In stark contrast to President Obama’s plan that outsources American jobs and American energy, the bipartisan plan that passed today is an environmentally responsible drill-smart plan that will create jobs, grow our economy, and lower gasoline prices with more American energy,” said Chairman Hastings following the Committee Markup. As amended, H.R. 6082 will implement a new schedule for 29 lease sales, protect national defense and military operations and provide for separate environmental reviews for each specific lease sale.

I expect this to pass in the House, but be killed, like every other piece of legislation in the past three-and-a-half years that helped, rather than harmed America, by Harry Reid (D-NV) and his Marxist and neo-fascist followers in the Senate.

Despite his claims that he supports all energy resources, and that oil output is at “unprecedented” highs, Obama and his thugs in the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency have done more to stomp on oil, gas, and coal production than even the most radical greenies could have hoped. The Congressional Research Service just issued a report showing that Obama’s offshore drilling lease plan for 2012-2017 has the fewest lease sales offered since the program began in 1980. Add this to his dictatorial refusal to “allow” the Keystone XL Pipeline, his foot-dragging on issuing onshore permits, his attacks on fracking, and you have a picture of someone out to kill an industry.

But wait, you say. What about protecting the environment? What about clean air and water and endangered species? We have laws, you know!

I do indeed know. I also know, as should, at this point, every American with half a brain, that the environment is not now, nor has it ever been, in danger of permanent damage from resource extraction, agriculture, industry, or development. Every problem that has ever arisen has been dealt with and fixed. The notion that a vast, jack-booted, tax-gobbling bureaucracy with an ever-enlarging, heavily armed paramilitary police force is necessary to “save the planet” is either naïve, stupid, or part of the radical cabal using the environment to attack capitalism and constitutional government.

It has been pointed out repeatedly that “environmentalism” has nothing to do with protecting the environment. It is solely a weapon of the globalist left to attack capitalism. If they can stop our ability to use the land for the extraction of natural resources, they can break us economically and hamstring us militarily.

A prime example is the Obama administration’s ordering of the creation of what they are tellingly calling the Great Green Fleet. Not satisfied with demoralizing, demonizing, and gutting the military at every opportunity, the Fraud in the White House now is forcing them to use “bio-fuels,” the cost of which is astronomical. The Navy has paid from $27 to $424 per gallon since the inception of this military-busting scheme back in 2009. The Air Force, too, has been subjected to this, paying $59 per gallon for “green” jet fuel. Clearly, to Obama and his leftist allies in the Department of Surrender, national security is something to be strangled, not strengthened.

As usual, the liars on the left who promote all this “sustainable” nonsense while claiming to care ever-so-much for the world’s poor, have blatantly ignored the fact that the manufacture and use of bio-fuels is causing starvation, worldwide, and contributing to the pollution that it is supposed to be a remedy for (see here, here, and here). With global warming shown to be a total sham, a scam to panic governments into destroying their own economies – and citizens in the process – it should be obvious to even the most dedicated political ostrich that to continue to promote “green energy” is part of an agenda that is about destruction, not protection.

With only about 13 weeks left until the November elections, I urge you to make the effort to find out where your candidates stand on re-opening OUR country to We, the People, for the extraction of the natural resources that OUR public land was created to provide for US. If they are not for re-opening OUR public land to US, and the jobs that it will create for US, then do whatever is necessary to elect someone who is.