Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=307062331862150
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Energy Policy: With nearly 70% of voters demanding more domestic oil, the Democratic Congress is about to sneak a new drilling ban into a must-pass government funding bill — while claiming it supports drilling.
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Earlier this month, Rasmussen Reports found that 69% of voters support offshore oil drilling. That's no wonder, with fuel prices still painfully high and widespread concerns that America is becoming dangerously dependent on oil-rich foreign nations with ties to Islamic terrorists in the Middle East and hostile regimes like that of leftist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
The do-nothing Democratic Congress may not have passed an appropriations bill all year long, but it's now in a position in which inaction would actually serve the public good.
At the end of this month, the quarter-century-long ban on oil and gas leasing on most of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) expires. With 97% of our offshore lands sitting unleased, the United States is in the dubious position of being the only industrialized country in the world that restricts access to so much of its offshore resources.
Considering public outrage over high prices at the pump, you'd think the people's representatives would be eager to carry out the public will and let the outdated ban expire — especially since in the 21st century the exploration and extraction of oil is no longer the dirty, ecologically risky business it once was.
In July, President Bush lifted the executive branch's longtime ban on offshore drilling. That placed the ball squarely in the court of the Democratic Congress, which must renew the ban every year in the form of appropriations legislation in order to keep the drilling prohibition in effect.
But when it comes to Democratic Party bosses in Congress, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the vox populi always seems to get shouted down by the special interests to which their party is enthralled. In this case, it's enviro-extremists who think Barack Obama was right when he recommended an energy policy of everyone checking the air in their tires.
Wind, sun, corn, hydrogen — these forms of energy are obviously in our long-term future as substitutes for petroleum. But Democrats refuse to accept that the desperately needed remedy to our short-term and intermediate-term energy woes is more of our own oil and gas — now.
And so they are using the massive, end-of-the-fiscal-year "continuing resolution" to try to get Pelosi's "Kill Drill" legislation enacted into law. By attaching it to a must-pass budget measure, they hope to force President Bush to sign, convince voters that Democrats have "done something" about drilling, and thus neutralize the biggest political issue of the year for John McCain and congressional GOP candidates.
It won't wash. Pelosi's "Comprehensive American Energy Security and Consumer Protection Act" actually bans drilling in places where we know the oil and gas are. It prohibits drilling within 50 miles of our coasts.
The House bill deprives the states from sharing in royalty revenues — a strong built-in disincentive for state governments, whose legislatures would have to approve drilling off the state coast separately from Congress.
The measure's provisions for utilizing oil shale reserves in Western states are tepid at best. The legislation does nothing to encourage more use of nuclear power. Yet it will raise oil prices by taxing oil companies to the hilt to pay for subsidies and tax breaks for research into green alternatives to oil that are too expensive and still at the drawing-board stage.
With Congress scheduled to take yet another recess later this week for final campaigning before Election Day, defeat of this latest attempt to pass a drilling-bill-that-isn't would likely mean the matter is being handed on to the next Congress — and the next president. That is to be fervently hoped for, because what Sen. Reid and Speaker Pelosi are trying to do is pretend they are responding to the people's demands for more domestic oil when they actually are doing the opposite.
The voters will have to elect a far different Congress this November to see a real drilling bill become law.
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