While some stops on House Republicans’ energy blitz focused on energy booms and thriving communities, a trip to the Gulf of Mexico will serve as a somber reminder to members about oil companies being driven away to other countries — and taking the jobs with them.
Tomorrow, Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise (R) will take some colleagues, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), 60 miles beyond the southern coastline to visit a deepwater production platform and a deepwater drilling rig to see an industry struggling to get back to work after the BP Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 — companies that are following safety standards but still can’t get a clear path to resuming production.
Scalise told PJM from this leg of the 2012 American Energy and Jobs Tour that “the irony is that there are a lot of companies paying for leases but haven’t been able to fully exercise them.”
He cites 19,000 lost jobs in the Gulf “because of the president’s policies,” and said the administration “deliberately” does not give companies clear guidance to resume operations.
The congressman compared the conundrum to a basketball game in which the referee is holding the ball while the clock’s running and the teams are trying to play.
“Surely you won’t find oil if the federal government won’t let you,” he said.
“I think the president is realizing now that three years of failed energy policies have caught up with him,” Scalise said.
And I think he doesn’t care, because Valerie Jarrett told him it doesn’t matter.
Romney 2012.
To the left’s beloved Sierra Club, NRDC, etc., obstruction of energy production in the US is the goal. For Obama and his ilk, the only “good” energy in this country is the pathetically small amount that comes (at very high cost) from solar and wind sources. For them, the gutting of our ability to produce conventional, proven sources of energy is success, not failure. The Sierra Club brags about it:
http://content.sierraclub.org/naturalgas/
http://www.sierraclub.org/oil/
http://www.beyondcoal.org/dirtytruth/how-many
and those are some good jobs too. the lowest paid guy on my boat makes about $40k/ yr ( he’s the cook). and the rest make from $70k topping out at $150k or so. and we aren’t even the best paid guys there are some making even more. pretty good for jobs that don’t require even a highschool diploma.
“I think the president is realizing now that three years of failed energy policies have caught up with him,” Scalise said.
Rep. Scalise is makng a fundamental error in his analysis of the situation. Obama’s energy policy was to put fossil fuel industries out of business to the benefit, desires and pocketbooks of his envornmental and reneweable energy crony capitalist, zealots and political supporters. His policies have been successful, not a failure, to the extent they have done that. They have only failed in that he has not yet been able to completely shut down the coal and oil industries and the industries that are heavy users of those energy sources. and are not failures as Rep. Scalise says. Understanding this fundamental point, which is clearly obvious by Obama’s actions and his own words, is critical in being able to articulately make arguments and persuade people to stop it. To argue that Obama has failed exposes you as a fool that simply does not understand what you opponent has been up to and make you sound like you want him to succeed in his goals.
I just cannot get over the contradiction we are supposed to accept –that BP insiders and their investment bankers unloaded their BP shares in chunks of a third to two thirds of entire long-term holdings, explaining that the Macondo well drilling ahead in the Gulf of Mexico was having major problems with wellbore mechanics. Nevermind that stock movements of such magnitude are never seen on the impact of such a tiny fraction of a major company’s holdings –the ratio makes no sense unless the blowout was very close to predictable –”a sure thing”.
Fast forward to the explanation for the blowout: Carelessness, sloppy observation, fantastical misinterpretations of hyper-critical pressure tests, hasty P&A procedures on a planned re-entry by production assembly, hurry-up corner-cutting on the payoff procedures of the entire enterprise, and the seeming utter loss of all awareness of all the dangers that had caused the remarkable insider sell-off that was supposedly based of the super-narrow criticality of all the drilling parameters on this “high probability of high consequence events” well.
The two stories are supposed to be the one story –but the one story keeps splitting into the two, like a single-celled paramecium procreating into, oh, say, oil and water.
It just don’t add up. I say this as an old hand in both the drilling and the stock-trading ends of the industry, who has also collected stories (SW Louisiana kinfolk) as well as off the net a few hundred links containing information that has apparently, somehow (cough), flown right under or over the radar of our government law enforcement agencies.
Sux to be an American these days. Who was it that called the 1930s “that low, dishonest decade” ? Well, it’s time for another sobriquet.