President Obama has several times claimed, “that under my Administration oil production is higher than it has been in a decade or more.” That is a true, but misleading, statement because during the period FY2007 through FY2012, all of the increased oil and gas production came from private and state land, over which Obama had no control, meanwhile production from federal lands, over which he does have control, decreased.  Obama was hypocritically taking credit for positive events that happened in spite of his policies.

That assertion comes from a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, “U.S. Crude Oil and Natural Gas Production in Federal and Non-Federal Areas.” Here are the data graphically:

This result reflects the use of fracking on State and private land and the de facto moratorium on leasing Federal land.

According to the CRS report, “On non-federal lands, there were modest fluctuations in oil production from fiscal years (FY) 2008-2010, then a significant increase from FY2010 to FY2012 increasing total U.S. oil production by about 1.1 million barrels per day over FY2007 production levels. All of the increase from FY2007 to FY2012 took place on non-federal lands, and the federal share of total U.S. crude oil production fell by about seven percentage points.”

“The shale gas boom has resulted in rising supplies of natural gas. Overall, U.S. natural gas production rose by four trillion cubic feet or 20% since 2007, while production on federal lands (onshore and offshore) fell by about 33% and production on non-federal lands grew by 40%.”

CRS also says that the bureaucratic burden of drilling on Federal land is much more burdensome than on state or private land, and concludes that production from Federal land will remain lower because “the regulatory framework for developing resources on federal lands will likely remain more involved and time-consuming than that on private land.” CRS notes that time to process drilling permits rose from 218 days in 2006 to 307 days in 2011.

There is great potential for discovery and production of oil and gas on Federal land, including off-shore drilling. However, as noted by Investor’s Business Daily, President Obama chose instead “to withdraw tracts of federal land that had already been cleared for oil and gas development” and he ignored a judge’s order to lift a ban on off-shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. In effect, Obama administration policies close about 85% of potential off-shore areas to drilling.

The Wall Street Journal reports: “Mr. Obama has blocked exploration and production on significant areas of the Outer Continental Shelf, and the few leases he has put up for auction contain land that is of little value to drillers….The U.S. oil and gas boom has been a rare bright spot in the otherwise gloomy Obama economy. Imagine how much more energy the U.S. could produce, and how many more high-paid jobs it could create, if the Obama Administration stopped being an obstacle.”

See also:

Open federal land to energy exploration and development to boost economy

President Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy isn’t

Obama’s April Fools Joke Shows off-shore areas still blocked by Obama policy

The “yes side” was written by Joseph Nevins is an associate professor of geography at Vassar College. His essay was essentially a rant about the evils of capitalism. He used emotive phrases such as “climate crisis” and set up straw men implications that drought, wildfires and hurricane Sandy were the results of human-caused climate change. He failed to present any supporting physical evidence.

The “no side” was written by Amy Ridenour, chairman of the National Center for Public Policy Research. She said it was “a good thing because policies enacted to fight global warming hurt people. Anti-global-warming policies are crafted to raise the price of energy to deter its use. They cause inflation and kill jobs.” And, “Even anti-global-warming activists admit the policies they fight for won’t have a meaningful impact on global temperatures. Too little, they say.”

Ridenour points out that the major carbon dioxide emissions of the future will be in China and India – out of control of American policy.

Ridenour also provides some physical evidence that carbon dioxide forcing is not a major factor: “Data collected from 3,000 land and sea locations around the globe and jointly released last month by Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre (HADCRUT) and the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia show that from early 1997 until August 2012 there was no noticeable rise in global temperatures.”

I have added the graph of HADCRUT data. A version of this graph was published in the British Daily Mail here (The link provides a discussion of the reaction to these results).

This “pause” in global warming shows that forcing by carbon dioxide is very weak compared to the forcings of natural variation. This “pause” is also contrary to what climate models predict, indicating that the models are not programmed to reflect reality.

In my opinion, this point-counterpoint editorial pair was valuable because it shows the nature of the argument. The “alarmist’s” fact-free diatribe demonstrates the truth of Mencken’s admonition: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

The “skeptic’s” side is more akin to Dragnet’s Sgt. Joe Friday who implored informants to provide “Just the facts, ma’am.”

See also:

A Perspective on Climate Change a tutorial

Carbon Dioxide and the Greenhouse Effect

Humans and the Carbon Cycle

Droughts in the Southwest put in perspective

Hurricane Sandy in perspective

An original proposal at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was that Congress select the president and vice president, but this was finally considered to make the president too beholden to Congress. The electoral college was a compromise between the big and small states and reflects the fact that our country is a union of states.

Each state has a number of electors equal to its Congressional representation (senators plus representatives). Also, the District of Columbia has three electors. In nearly all states, the winner of the popular vote in the state gets all the state’s electors.

Why not have a direct popular vote? Arguments have been that a direct popular vote would cause candidates to ignore rural areas and small states of the heartland and concentrate on the large population centers of the coasts. That same argument is put forth against the electoral method because it forces candidates to focus on “swing” states. For instance, it is possible to win the election by winning just eleven states and disregarding the rest of the country: California (55 votes), Texas (38), New York (29), Florida (29), Illinois (20), Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), Michigan (16), Georgia (16), North Carolina (15), and New Jersey (14) equal the currently required 270 electoral votes.

But, even with a “majority rule” popular vote, the majority may not rule.

For instance, in six postwar elections–1948, 1960, 1968, 1992, 1996, and 2000–no candidate had a popular majority. In the 2000 Bush-Gore contest, Bush got 47.9% of the nationwide popular vote versus Gore’s 48.4%. Neither got the majority of voters. In 1992, Bill Clinton won with only 43% of the popular vote (George H.W. Bush got 37.5%; Ross Perot got 19%). This was similar to the 1968 race in which Nixon won against Humphrey. Nixon got 43.4% of popular vote, Humphrey got 42.7% and George Wallace got 13.5%. The electoral college transforms a popular plurality into a majority and a small majority into a bigger majority, thereby providing a more satisfying outcome.

What about apportioning a state’s electoral votes based on the popular vote? This has been suggested, but others claim such a system promotes fraud and could lead to lawsuits and challenges in every county in which the vote count was close.

The current system has a popular component within each state and gives each state a say in the federal union. I’m sure the debate will continue.

The mainstream media has been noticeably silent on EPA plans for the country … a slew of new rules and regulations to go into effect after November 7th that Obama has ordered be kept under wraps until after the election. What this Administration doesn’t want American families to know is precisely what they need to know.

 The US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Minority Staff recently released a report on the upcoming EPA rules and regulations that, it said, will “eliminate American jobs, drive up the price of gas at the pump even more, impose construction bans on local communities, and essentially shut down American oil, natural gas, and coal production. They don’t want this economic pain to hit American families just before the election because it would cost President Obama votes.”

 The Senate report, A Look Ahead to EPA Regulations for 2013, looked at 13 of these new regulations, noting that they will hit American families, the poor, and those on fixed incomes especially hard, as Americans struggle more than ever in this economy and have already seen their energy costs skyrocket over the past four years.

 The entire report is a must read, but here are a few examples of what is being planned for us:

 New greenhouse gas regulations will no longer just affect coal plants, but will regulate churches, schools, restaurants, hospitals and farms, putting an enormous burden on Americans. “President Obama himself warned [these] would be worse than global warming cap-and-trade legislation,” said the Senate report. The new regulations will cost more than $300 to $400 billion a year and significantly raise the price of gas at the pump and energy in homes.

 Farms, for example, will be required to comply with costly permit mandates and have to pay a “cow tax” on each animal and an annual fee on greenhouse gases emitted. EPA estimates that over 37,000 farms and ranches will be subject to greenhouse gas permits, at an average cost of $23,000 per permit each year, affecting over 90% of the livestock production in the country. “The EPA will proceed to issue regulations, industry by industry, until virtually every aspect of the American economy is constrained by strict regulatory requirements and high energy prices.”

 New ozone rules will cost $90 billion a year by EPA estimates, while other studies have projected costs upwards of a trillion dollars and destroy 7.4 million jobs, the report found. Large numbers of companies, by EPA’s own projections, will be unable to meet the stringent restrictions and are expected to close.

 Natural gas fracturing regulations will severely impact energy production, resulting in new permits and well workovers costing $1.499 Billion to $1.615 Billion a year. At least “14 Federal agencies are working to regulate hydraulic fracturing at the federal level, so that they can limit and eventually stop the practice altogether,” the report revealed.

 Clean Water Act new guidelines would allow EPA to expand federal control over virtually every body of water in the country, no matter how small, the report described.

 Final stormwater regulations proposed by the EPA would become “the most expensive rule in EPA history,” according to the Senate. It would establish for the first time, standards for post-construction runoff, mandate cities to change existing buildings, stormwater sewers and streets, “and mandate the use of ‘green infrastructure’ techniques (like ‘green roofs,’ rain gardens, permeable pavement) to replace conventional stormwater management practices.”

 New Gas regulations called Tier III, would lower the sulfur content in gasoline to from 30 to 10 parts per million at a cost of up to $10 billion initially and $2.4 billion each year. That would add another 9 cents per gallon in manufacturing costs, cost that will be passed on to consumers at the pump.

 Farm Dust Regulations being proposed are so tightened, they would be below the dust created during normal farming operations and be impossible for rural American farms to meet.

 The report goes on in more detail about the planned regulatory onslaught. It also describes the war on coal, which includes the EPA obstructing 190 coal mining permits, jeopardizing 18,000 jobs, and trying to stop permits that have already been granted. It describes the war on oil and natural gas, such as EPA alleging water contamination from fracturing, even when it was unable to find supportive evidence and quietly withdrew the scares after the damage had been done to companies and had frightened homeowners.

 You can read the entire Senate report here.

 See also:

Electricity supply endangered by EPA regulations

BREAKING: Court tosses EPA Cross-state air pollution rule

EPA versus Arizona on regional haze issue

EPA war on coal threatens Tucson water supply

EPA fuel standards costly and ineffective

EPA, ethanol, and catch 22

EPA Admits CO2 Regulation Ineffective

How Many Haz-Mat Suits Do You Need to Change a Lightbulb?

Obama’s previous campaign was about “Hope & Change.” But it seems that mere “Hope” was not enough when competent action was required. The “Change” part doesn’t seem to be working either.

According to Investor’s Business Daily the change so far is:

• Median incomes: These have fallen 7.3% since Obama took office, which translates into an average of $4,000. Since the so-called recovery started, median incomes continued to fall, dropping $2,544, or 4.8%.

 • Long-term unemployed: More than three years into Obama’s recovery, 811,000 more still fall into this category than when the recession ended.

 • Poverty: The poverty rate climbed to 15.1% in 2010, up from 14.3% in 2009, and economists think it may have hit 15.7% last year, highest since the 1960s.

 • Food stamps: There are 11.8 million more people on food stamps since Obama’s recovery started.

 • Disability: More than 1 million workers have been added to Social Security’s disability program in the last three years.

 • Gas prices: A gallon of gas cost $1.89 when Obama was sworn in. By June 2009, the price was $2.70. Today, it’s $3.84.

 • Misery Index: When Obama took office, the combination of unemployment and inflation stood at 7.83. Today it’s 9.71.

 • Union membership: Even unions are worse off under Obama, with membership dropping half a million between 2009 and 2011.

 • Debt: Everyone is far worse off if you just look at the national debt. It has climbed more than $5 trillion under Obama, crossing $16 trillion for the first time on Tuesday and driving the U.S. credit rating down.

So the Obama campaign has come up with a new slogan:

The slogan “Forward” has been used before, probably just a coincidence:

Is this the “Forward” you want?

See also:

The Collectivist Mind

Reclaiming Americanism and the Constitution

Personal Responsibility and Independence

Freedom, Morality, and Ignorance

With those phrases Obama dismisses hard work and individual ideas. He trashes achievement. He says nothing is possible without government assistance. Maybe Obama is too used to crony capitalism in his quest to transform America. It must take a heavily subsidized village.

The speech may come to be seen as a defining moment into Obama’s mentality and his campaign.

Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the Senate against Scott Brown parrots Obama, ” “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You build a factory out there, good for you, but I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate.”

Who does she think pays the bulk of the taxes to pay for the roads and schools?

Thomas Sowell notes, “There was a time, within living memory, when the achievements of others were not only admired but were often taken as an inspiration for imitation of the same qualities that had served these achievers well, even if we were not in the same field of endeavor and were not expecting to achieve on the same scale.”

Sowell also writes, “People who succeed — whether in business or anywhere else — are often said to be ‘privileged,’ even if they started out poor and worked their way up the hard way….Personal responsibility, whether for achievement or failure, is a threat to the whole vision of the left, and a threat the left goes all-out to combat, using rhetoric uninhibited by reality.”

Charles Krauthammer writes, “the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom….Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.”

Krauthammer continues, “Obama’s infrastructure argument is easily refuted by a controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the different outcomes.”

In the collectivist mind, citizens are treated as orphan children who must be guided and cared for; and only government can do that properly. Only the elites in government, the anointed ones, are smart enough and caring enough to do that “for the children.”

Above all citizens must be taught proper thinking and action; they must be controlled so they can enjoy the resulting collectivist utopias such as Cuba, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union.

　”I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”  -Thomas Jefferson

Obama’s words show that he does not understand America and what it is to be an American.

The Cato Institute has a report that bears on the matter of political philosophy: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.

See also:

Reclaiming Americanism and the Constitution

Personal Responsibility and Independence

Freedom, Morality, and Ignorance

Property Rights and Freedom

Beware of Sustainable Development

The story was really about President Obama feeling the heat of rising gasoline prices. In his radio address, Obama said he wants to end $4 billion in annual tax breaks for the oil and gas industry. That tax break is mainly the oil depletion allowance, established in 1913. The tax break was given to partly offset the risk of oil exploration and encourage oil companies to conduct more exploration to replace the depleting reserves of producing wells. If the depletion allowance is removed, the added cost of doing business will increase. Guess who will pay for that at the pump? By the way, Department of Energy announced it has given $21 Billion in (not tax) subsidies to the alternative energy industry in the form of loan guarantees. The Wall Street Journal has an analysis here.

Oil companies have been making what seem like large profits. Investors Business Daily puts it in perspective:

Exxon earned $10.65 billion on $114 billion in revenue. Shell’s $8.78 billion profit came on $114.84 billion in revenue. Chevron’s expected top line of $66.62 billion will likely yield a bottom line of $5.69 billion. These are not outsize margins — roughly 9% after taxes in the case of Exxon, less than 5% for Shell and 8.5% for Chevron.

In comparison, Apple made $6 billion on revenue of $24.7 billion, a profit margin of almost 25% in the first quarter. Google’s profit margin for the same period was nearly 27%. Too high-tech for you? McDonald’s makes 20 cents on the dollar.

Gasoline prices depend on supply and demand, and over the short term, the expectations of what supply and demand may be. Political turmoil tends to raise prices because of the uncertainty on the supply side.

Federal policies have put many areas off-limits to exploration and production. And, there is threat of more withdrawals. For instance, the Fish & Wildlife Service may list the dunes sagebrush lizard as an endangered species. This could shut down, or at least hinder, exploration and production of oil in southeast New Mexico and West Texas, including production in Texas’ two top producing counties. And, the EPA ruled that Shell Oil cannot proceed with exploratory shallow-water drilling on vast tracts that it has leased from the Federal government in the Beauford and Chukchi Seas north of Alaska, claiming the exploratory drilling may violate the Clean Air Act. Shell did not consider the emissions of an ice breaker that may be required during these operations. Where is all that global warming when you really need it?

Obama is contributing to the uncertainty. In his January State of the Union speech he called oil “yesterday’s energy.” In March, at a speech at Georgetown University, he said that he wanted to accelerate the production of oil and gas in the U.S. In April, he said he wants to stop “subsidizing yesterday’s energy sources.” The implications of the EPA’s effort to control carbon dioxide emissions is another source of uncertainty.

Taxes also have an impact on the price of gasoline. See map of gasoline taxes by state here and map of diesel taxes by state here. Federal taxes are 18.4 cents per gallon (cpg) for gasoline and 24.4 cpg for diesel fuel. You will see that 17 states have taxes higher than the national average.

For more information, see Gasoline Prices and the Obama Energy Policy

Obama clueless on energy part 1

Obama clueless on energy part 2

Obama administration still clueless on energy

 In several previous posts, I have accused Obama of being clueless on energy. However, I could be wrong about his cluelessness. If I am wrong, it means that Obama knows exactly what he is doing in perpetrating policies that weaken our position and cost us jobs. I will leave it to the reader to ponder the motives for his destructive policies.

Julian Simon, in his book, The Ultimate Resource 2, wrote: “Energy is the master resource, because energy enables us to convert one material into another. As natural scientists continue to learn more about the transformation of materials from one form to another with the aid of energy, energy will be even more important.”

In an essay, Paul Driessen notes that Obama’s science advisor John Holdren knows the importance of energy, “A reliable and affordable supply of energy is absolutely critical to maintaining and expanding economic prosperity where such prosperity already exists and to creating it where it does not,” says Holdren.

Driessen goes on to write, “Unlocking America’s still abundant hydrocarbon resources and unleashing our innovative, hard-driving free enterprise system would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in leasing, royalty and tax revenues for federal, state and local governments. It would put millions back to work … help stanch the flow of red ink … keep tens of billions of crude oil spending and investment in America … and create enormous new wealth, instead of redistributing a dwindling pool of old wealth.”

Yet Obama’s policies, rhetoric, and regulation are denying us this potential.

I don’t know if the Obama administration is simply clueless on energy, or if there is a determined ideological effort to cripple fossil fuel supplies in order to promote renewable energy, but the effect of administration policy is to discourage and hinder domestic production of fossil fuels.

In September, 2008, soon to be Energy Secretary Steven Chu told the Wall Street Journal, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Gas prices in Europe averaged about $8 a gallon at the time.

Contrary to administration rhetoric that the U.S. should become more energy independent, administration policy seems to be directed to do all it can to stifle domestic production.

Following the Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico, the administration imposed a drilling moratorium. That moratorium was lifted last October, but in fact still remains in force. The Interior Department has approved just one drilling application although more than 100 are pending. A federal judge ordered that the de facto moratorium be lifted but the administration has ignored that order. In fact, in early February, the federal judge held the Interior Department in contemp of court for dismissively ignoring his ruling to cease the drilling moratorium which the judge had previously struck down as “arbitrary and capricious.” Ironically, the de facto moratorium of Gulf drilling will deprive the federal government of $1.35 billion in royalties this year.

According to the Heritage Foundation, “Obama also reversed an earlier decision by his administration to open access to coastal waters for exploration, instead placing a seven-year ban on drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts and Eastern Gulf of Mexico as part of the government’s 2012-2017 Outer Continental Shelf Program.”

 The U.S. has abundant resources of oil and natural gas in shale deposits. According to the U.S. Geological Survey the U.S. holds more than half of the world’s oil shale resources. The largest known deposits of oil shale are located in a 16,000-square mile area in the Green River formation in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. The USGS’s most recent estimates (April, 2009) show the region may hold more than 1.5 trillion barrels of oil – six times Saudi Arabia’s proven resources, and enough to provide the United States with energy for the next 200 years. But Obama’s Interior Department is reversing Bush-era policy by delaying leases saying they need to take a “fresh look” at the situation.

The EPA has added costly new regulations to refineries over concern with global warming. The EPA is also denying approval of the Keystone pipeline which would increase the amount of oil the U.S. receives from Canada by over a million barrels per day.

If all this were not enough, the Interior Department has instituted a new “wild lands” policy that will bypass Congress in establishment of wilderness areas which will further delay and restrict access to our mineral resources.

The next time you fill your car with gasoline, don’t blame the oil companies for the high prices, the fault lies squarely with Obama’s energy policy.

Some (mainly conservative) columnists have attributed Obama’s Nero-like lack of concern to ulterior motives. For instance, Obama’s refusal to accept aid from the Dutch government is said to be a sop to the labor unions. And, Obama is using the oil spill disaster to renew his push for Cap & Trade climate legislation.

Maybe there are ulterior motives, but more likely, the less-than-prompt and effective response is probably due to incompetence by Obama and his bureaucracies, just like FEMA’s failure after Katrina. For instance the EPA dithered while considering the possible toxic effects of an oil dispersant that BP wanted to use. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is incensed with the Coast Guard because they stopped cleanup efforts to check whether the crews had proper fire extinguishers and life vests.

Meanwhile, Congress is holding hearings, with all their sound and fury, in a feigned effort to investigate BP (and give “face time” to legislators). Such hearings have no practical value in mitigating the oil spill.

Obama used the oil spill as an excuse to impose a six-month moratorium of deep water drilling, possibly to promote more “alternative energy” schemes. Obama said is was for “safety” concerns by the Department of the Interior, but analysis by the Wall Street Journal shows that this was all about politics. Another possible ulterior motive: the oil spill and Obama’s moratorium will aid Obama contributor George Soros who is heavily involved in Brazilian oil. Brazil stands to benefit from the BP oil spill catastrophe as the US moratorium makes more rigs available for other countries.

Yes, BP should be held responsible for the loss of economic activity caused by the accident. But government action, and inaction, is making things worse. They are not letting a good crisis go to waste.