Calculate your one-day Carbon Belch !
Posted on 06/06/2008 8:58:10 AM PDT by K-oneTexas
The High Cost of Saving ANWRby Raymond S. Kraft
At $130 a barrel, the real cost, the hidden cost, of Democrats' refusal to open up the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the oil resources off our coasts is 10 million jobs.
Ten million jobs for middle-class, working-class Americans that are being "outsourced" to OPEC daily, even as the Senate debates bizarrely complex "carbon cap and trade" legislation that would charge American businesses that produce carbon emissions (most of them) for the right to stay in business, then let those that reduce their carbon emissions sell or "trade" their carbon credits to other businesses that need to grow, but will use more energy as they do. The effect of this fiasco will be to impose a new tax on all businesses, and on all business growth, which will stunt business growth, economic growth, personal income growth, job growth, and tax receipts.
It's intended to fix the biggest non-problem in history, human-induced global warming. The fraud that has made Al Gore a centimillionaire. If we look at the real climate data, the long term temperature trends show us that the climate is 0.4 degrees warmer than 1,000 years ago, and 3 degrees cooler than 8,000 years ago. The Hadley Center for Climate Prediction charts the global temperature falling 0.4 degrees from 1988 to 1992, then rising 0.8 degrees from 1992 to peak in 1998, then falling 0.7 degrees by January 2008.
The climate has been changing as long as there has been a climate. It's not our fault, and we can't stop it.
But I digress.
Currently, the US imports roughly 25% of its oil, 5.4 million barrels a day, from OPEC, mostly from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria. At $130 a barrel, we are exporting over $700 million dollars a day to OPEC. $1.4 billion every two days. $256 billion a year. That's more than one-third of the US trade deficit of $720 billion. And that's why the value of the US dollar is falling. Not the only reason, but a big reason.
For twenty years, Environmentalists, Democrats, and a few misguided Republicans have been busy keeping Big Oil out of ANWR and out of the oil fields on the Coastal Shelves, where there are an estimated 635 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to heat 60 million American homes for a century, and 115 billion barrels of oil, enough to replace 100% of the oil we now buy from OPEC for 21 years. At $130 a barrel, that would cut out trade deficit by $5.4 trillion over 21 years.
Yes, $5.4 trillion. Enough to pay the entire Federal budget for nearly two years.
Critics say that opening up 2,000 acres of the 19,049,236 acre Alaska National Wildlife Refuge for oil production would do little to bring down the price of gas, and that may be so. But it would add jobs, by the millions, to the US economy. With an estimated 10 billion barrels, ANWR could produce 1 million barrels a day for thirty years. At $130 a barrel, that's $130 million a day. $47 billion a year.
A million dollars creates 40 jobs at at average pay of $50,000 a year. $130 million creates 5,200 jobs at $50,000 a year. $47 billion creates 1,880,000 new jobs for American workers at $50,000 a year. At current oil prices, by keeping ANWR off limits, Democrats reduce employment for the middle-class, working-class Americans they pretend to care about by 1,880,000 jobs. And that's enough jobs to cut the unemployment rate from 5% to 4%.
But what if we open up the Coastal Shelves for oil production, too? And produce 5.4 million barrels a day, to replace all the oil we buy from OPEC?
That would re-invest the $256 billion a year we now deport to OPEC back into the US economy. And that would fund 10,152,000 new jobs for working-class Americans, jobs that pay an average of $50,000 a year. And that's enough new jobs to reduce the unemployment rate, in theory, from 5% to 0%. Zero. And that is the high cost of keeping ANWR "pristine." We can lay the blame for 100% of America's unemployment at the feet of the Democrats and Environmentalists who keep ANWR and the coastal oil reserves off limits.
Put another way, every year that we continue buying 5.4 million barrels of oil a day from OPEC, we "outsource" more than ten million American jobs to OPEC. If Democrats really cared about working-class Americans, they would be rushing to open up ANWR and other oil and gas reserves on Federal lands as quickly as possible to create ten million new jobs, revalue the falling dollar, stimulate the economy, and write a declaration of independence from OPEC.
But, they don't.
Raymond S. Kraft is a retired attorney and writer from northern California.
Sorry..but dims don’t do logic...demagogy yes
ANWR is under no threat even if drilling was allowed.
We need a pool on what the price of gas needs to reach before the senate votes to open offshore USA and ANWR to drilling. Will it take only a solid $5 per gallon..and $6 diesel? Or will it take $6?
We are sure headed there before July 4th.
The ordinary folks of the US will only take so much from the limo libs.
At some point the American people are going to have to revolt.
“Sorry..but dims don’t do logic...demagogy yes”
Mike Goldfarb: Some people are perplexed by your rhetoric on global warming. Is this one of those ‘no surrender’ issues, or is there room for discussion?
McCain: There’s always room for discussion. But I don’t know how any conservative can not support cap and trade. We did it with acid rain. The Europeans are putting it into effect. It’s a capitalist process that encourages green technologies. If we’re wrong, all we’ve done is adopt green technologies, in an effort to give our kids a greener planet.
As far as ANWR is concerned, I don’t want to drill in the Grand Canyon, and I don’t want to drill in the Everglades. This is one of the most pristine and beautiful parts of the world.
The crying shame is that a message like this has never been pushed by the oil and gas lobby, by the RNC or by President Bush the first or GWB. Thus, we have a mess made and supported by people who made a big mistake about oil drilling.
Sadly I agree. I was watching Glenn Beck the other night, and he was interviewing the Gov. of Alaska. She said that ANWR is roughly the same size as LAX.
It’s really sad that such a small portion of the population gets to dictate what the rest of us have to (for now) live with.
Their old line is: It’s not enough oil, we would use it too fast. By the time it gets up and running it won’t have any real effect. And then of course the weak-kneed “environmental” arguments.
I am sick of their crap.
Cap and trade, in it’s pure form, is an excellent free-market method of handling REAL pollution and environmental impacts.
It allows us to spend money where it is MOST effective, so we all get the most benefit.
That’s why it was good for acid rain, which we all agree was something we wanted to eliminate. Also smog-causing chemicals would be good to cut.
For example, we use a very wasteful system for cars. We mandated a lot of special requirements for cutting exhaust, some of which cost us gas mileage. And most cities have strict standards for new cars, so you have to spend money to keep your car at peak “exhaust” efficiency — while old cars are exempt.
If instead they had simply taxed everybody the cost of the annual inspections, and used the money to buy people’s old cars, we could have doubled the value of our spending.
The problem here is that we have no evidence that C02 is actually a problem — and some possibility that we need MORE, not LESS, C02.
So even a free-market cap-and-trade won’t be any good, because we don’t know what we are trying to accomplish.
Of course, the Senate bill wasn’t a free-market cap-and-trade, it was a big-government socialistic cap-and-trade.
A free-market system would be revenue neutral, and would simply apply a flat tax to the exhaust you were trying to eliminate. A business that could cut lots of exhaust would spend money to do so, a business where there is little to gain would pay the tax because it would be cheaper. Over time, money would ensure that the “problem” was solved starting with the biggest bang for a buck.
INTREP
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