by Steven Hayward in Energy Policy
Obama to Ohio: Drop Dead
John beat me to the story of the Obama Administration’s totally explicable decision (that is to say, totally political decision) to delay the leasing of shale gas fields in Ohio.
Obama and his Chu toy seem really to believe the green energy nonsense that we’re only a few years away from scaling up wind and solar and pixie dust and other phantasms to replace fossil fuel.
More importantly, it is clear that delaying the Keystone pipeline is not enough to appease the environmental community, which is remains at a boil over the Obama Administration’s cancellation of the ozone rules and a few other backtracks.
If you want to get a little more of an idea of the federal permitting problem, have a look at the embedded video on this Energy Information Administration squib about the Bakken field in North Dakota and Montana.
As you will see from the animation, the bulk of activity in the early years occurred in Montana, on some old federal leases, but in recent years those fields have started to tail off while North Dakota has boomed into the fourth largest oil-producing state in the country. Most of the activity in North Dakota is occurring on private or state land (ditto for gas production in Pennsylvania), while new exploration and production in Montana has atrophied because the fields there are mostly on federal land, and new areas are not being opened up.
Meanwhile, the news is out yesterday that the Sierra Club’s long time leader, Carl Pope, is finally retiring. But buried in the news story was this detail:
Mr. Brune [the current executive director] acknowledged that paid membership had declined by about 100,000 in recent years, to just more than 600,000, but attributed it to financial hardship caused by the recession.
by John Hinderaker in Economy, Energy Policy, Obama administration
Obama’s Job-Destroying Machine Grinds On
I can’t figure out whether it is due to malice or incompetence; all I know is, if you wanted to hurt America’s economy, you would do pretty much everything the Obama administration does. Energy policy is the absolute worst. First Obama delayed (and perhaps killed) the Keystone pipeline. Michael Ramirez sums up that decision, which can be explained only as an economically irrational attempt to shore up the president’s liberal base in advance of next year’s election:
It seems that every day brings a new Obama administration outrage. Today, it was the USDA’s decision to delay shale drilling in Ohio:President Obama’s United States Department of Agriculture has delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio for up to six months by cancelling a mineral lease auction for Wayne National Forest (WNF). The move was taken in deference to environmentalists, on the pretext of studying the effects of hydraulic fracturing. …It has been estimated that that drilling in the Utica shale will produce up to 204,500 jobs by 2015. The Obama administration claims that those jobs have only been delayed and are not gone forever. Sure. In the unlikely event that Obama is re-elected, the only constraint on his economically destructive policies will be gone, and we can expect him to do everything possible to kill energy production and destroy job creation.
Speaking of the WNF gas drilling, one environmentalist group spokesman suggested that moving forward with drilling “could turn the Ohio Valley into Ozone Alley,” even though Wayne National Forest already has nearly 1300 oil and gas wells in operation which this study does not affect.
