By Rick Manning – What if you were to learn that a massive Saudi Arabia sized supply of oil was available just 500 miles north of our border?
What if this supply of oil was controlled by an ally of the United States who wanted to develop it and ship it south?
What if this supply of oil did not require any off-shore drilling?
Wouldn’t it make sense to allow that oil to reach the U.S. market rather than having it drilled and transported to China instead?
Ironically, this oil exists in Canada near the NHL hockey town of Edmonton, where vast reserves are available to be delivered to the U.S. market.
So what is the hold up in bringing it to the United States?
The U.S. State Department!
That’s right. Hillary Clinton’s State Department has been sitting on the approval of a pipeline to move the oil from Canada to the United States for more than three years.
The problem? Environmental groups don’t want the Alberta oil sands field developed because they believe that getting the oil out of the ground will cause increased greenhouse gas emissions, and the Obama Administration consistently sides with the powerful enviro lobby over the economic interests of the nation. So, these environmental groups are lobbying against building a pipeline that will bring this oil to the U.S. markets.
The most amazing thing in this equation is that it assumes that failure to give the U.S. markets and consumers access to this oil will stop the development of the oil field. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Chinese are investing billions of dollars in the development of an oil pipeline from these very fields to a Pacific Ocean port facility in British Columbia. So, the oil is going to be taken out of the ground whether it is piped into the U.S. or not.
Knowing this, it brings to question the motives of the environmental groups. If the oil is going to be developed anyway, why would they object to having it transported to the United States? Perhaps this question is the key to their entire approach to a “balanced” energy strategy.
To the environmentalist lobby, the cheap availability of fossil fuels is their enemy.
That’s why they oppose the development of clean burning natural gas fields which are abundant throughout the U.S.
That’s why they are attempting to eliminate coal as an energy source even though the U.S. has supplies that will last for hundreds of years.
And that is why they oppose offshore oil drilling and on-shore oil drilling. The fact is that any domestic oil drilling is seen as a threat to their agenda of driving U.S. energy costs up and sacrificing our national economy on the altar of the alternative fuels mythology.
Given this pressure from the normally undefeatable green lobby, it is unclear what the Obama Administration will do. After all, this is the same Obama who sees nothing wrong with U.S. tax dollars being spent to fund Brazilian oil company Petrobras’ deep water oil drilling off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, while blocking private U.S. company’s ability to drill off shore in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico and even Virginia. Ironically, Cuba is being helped by Venezuela to develop off-shore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico just 90 miles off the U.S. coast at the same time the Obama Administration continues to drag its feet in allowing U.S. development of the same oil fields.
For some reason, the Obama Administration can’t seem to figure out that it is a direct threat to our nation’s national security when we are dependent upon energy production controlled by foreign governments who don’t like us very much.
Given the history of the Obama Administration’s energy policy, it should be no surprise that they are befuddled by the question of whether or not it is better for oil that is developed in Canada to be delivered to U.S. refineries and made available to U.S. consumers, or for that same oil to be shipped off to China.
It makes one wonder if another agenda is at work in the environmental movement? Perhaps these groups should be forced to disclose who gives them money to throw their weight around against our nation’s economic interests. I suspect if the environmental movement’s funding was transparent, that green would not be that clean.
Rick Manning is the Director of Communications for Americans for Limited Government. You can follow Rick on Twitter at @RManning957.
