Cassity: Don’t listen to ‘enviro-wackos’ about oil

Gas prices, as this is written, are $4.69 for regular. In Northern California, it’s as much as a buck more. If you own an SUV, a pickup or a large family sedan, this means more than $100 to fill up.

Elections have consequences. This is just one of them.

We all know where the president of the United States stands on the subject of energy. Coal, oil, diesel, gasoline and natural gas: bad.

Wind, solar, bio-fuels, algae, bicycles, Nikes and every other form of so-called “green” energy: good.

Barack Obama has made it clear that he wants to shut down coal mines, keep new ones from opening, stop oil drilling everywhere, but especially on public lands, and minimize or eliminate altogether fracking of rock-incarcerated gases.

He tried to pass a cap and trade plan through Congress while he had complete control over both houses. He was unsuccessful because this way to buy and sell carbon credits is ludicrous. A similar little plan has more than doubled Spain’s unemployment rate.

He is against drilling in the Gulf, having tried to end it entirely, off either coast and in the Arctic, and the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would bring almost 700,000 barrels of new oil daily from Canada all the way to the Texas refineries. This pipeline would employ more than 20,000 union workers almost immediately and mean more than $8 billion a year in new revenue, all without a single dollar of taxpayer money being “invested.”

He has shown us all his antipathy toward this plan by refusing to sign off on it, even though the unions love it and it had already gone through more than three years of exhaustive review and approval by the State Department.

Why? Because donor-rich groups of enviro-wackos simply hate anything to do with fossil fuels. And they give Democrats even more money than do the unions. Shocker.

Through all of this Mr. Obama has looked us straight in the face and said he’s for an “all-of-the-above” strategy regarding the search for and the production of energy. Apparently he’s a proponent of the “a lie told often enough becomes the truth” school of political leadership.

In fact, one of the most bold-faced and easily disproved falsehoods he utters is that we Americans possess only 2% of the world’s oil, yet we use 20% of all energy.

The truth? We have much more than 2% of oil reserves and under the president, drilling on the public lands he controls is down more than 36%.

I hear you saying, “We want some proof!” OK, here’s the proof.

Anu K. Mittal, the government accounting office’s director of natural resources and the environment, testified recently on the subject of energy before the House Science Subcommittee on Energy. But instead of learning how horrible things are, she delivered something of a bombshell.

“The Green River Formation —– and assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale,” she said. “USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions. The Rand Corp., a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30% to 60% of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered. At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves [emphasis mine].”

Read that last sentence again. The largest remaining reserves of oil on the planet are not in Saudi Arabia or Iraq or the Emirates, places where they hate us and openly call for our demise. It’s here, in America. Combining that with the massive proven reserves in Canada and Mexico, means that North America has more than twice as much oil as the rest of the world put together. As we go broke filling up our cars, in a state where drilling for oil is tantamount to pedophilia, the question then is, what are we going to do about it?

Well, Mr. and Mrs. America, what indeed? I guess we’ll find out Nov. 7.

CHUCK CASSITY is a longtime Costa Mesa resident active in education, youth sports and other causes. His column appears every other Friday.

Editor’s note: Portions of this column originally appeared on Cassity’s blog, chuckmeisterunleashed.blogspot.com.