Free Republic

The media is showing bias in failing to give much attention to the rise in gasoline prices under President Barack Obama, says former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Gas prices now average $3.82 per gallon around the country, about double the level prevailing when Obama took office. “When George [W.] Bush was president, we heard about gas prices every time,” Huckabee, now a radio talk show host told Fox News Monday, Politico reports. “And they would take cameras to the pumps and have someone almost tearfully explaining that they were paying almost $2.50 a gallon. It’s amazing how quiet the media...

A new film starring Matt Damon presents American oil and natural gas producers as money-grubbing villains purportedly poisoning rural American towns. It is therefore of particular note that it is financed in part by the royal family of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. The creators of Promised Land have gone to absurd lengths to vilify oil and gas companies, as Scribe’s Michael Sandoval noted Wednesday. Since recent events have demonstrated the relative environmental soundness of hydraulic fracturing – a technique for extracting oil and gas from shale formations – Promised Land’s script has been altered to make doom-saying environmentalists the...

In what his campaign is billing as a major policy speech, Mitt Romney will unveil an energy plan Thursday that would give states the power to determine whether drilling should occur on federal lands within their borders as part of a larger effort to increase domestic oil production and achieve energy independence. Under current law, the federal government controls oil and gas permits for federal lands. But in a speech at an oilfield services company in Hobbs. N.M., Romney will argue that determination should be up to state officials, insisting individual states are in a better position to "develop, adopt...

Apparently, even though the administration has a five year plan to allow drilling in the Gulf and the Arctic...they're not that interested in living up to it. Shocker, I know. One would think that one of the primary requirements of energy independence would be having the ability to collect the energy through which one becomes independent by using. Somehow, this logic escapes the Obama administration as evidenced by their “Five-Year Plan.” However, if their goal was to diminish opportunities for energy resources, they’ve done a magnificent job. It is pretty well established that there is oil in the Gulf of...

"Until California surrenders to realism, its oil drillers will be fighting political and regulatory head winds. If they can look anywhere for hope, it's not to the political elites but to the broader public. Ordinary Californians are not anti-oil ideologues, and a fair number favor drilling off the state's coast."

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin on the future of oil exploration in the U.S. and the importance of the Keystone Pipeline.

Repsol, has confirmed that (his) company and its partners are abandoning drilling offshore Cuba, representing a major blow to the island's ambitions to secure oil self-sufficiency.... The decision follows reports that the Jaguey-1 exploration well drilled by Repsol and partners Statoil (Norway) and ONGC (India) on Block N26, in Cuba's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the Gulf of Mexico, had come up dry.

The heaviest polar ice in more than a decade could postpone the start of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean until the beginning of August, a delay of up to two weeks, Shell Alaska officials said. Unveiling a newly refurbished ice-class rig that is poised to begin drilling two exploratory wells this summer in the Beaufort Sea, Shell executives said Friday that the unusually robust sea ice would further narrow what already is a tight window for operations. The company's $4-billion program is designed to measure the extent of what could be the United States' most important new inventory...

While the White House and its media water-carriers try to distract the American public with gay-marriage talk and half-century-old tales of Mitt Romney’s prep-school pranks, the inconvenient truth remains: President Obama is responsible for perpetrating jaw-dropping, job-killing scientific fraud. And his minions are still trying to cover it up. New internal e-mails disclosed by the House Natural Resources Committee this week show that a supposedly exculpatory report on the administration’s doctored drilling moratorium analysis — issued by the Department of Interior’s inspector general’s office — was itself incomplete, misleading, and unsubstantiated. Even more damning, the documents reveal that the White...

Chairman Hastings: Documents Raise Serious Questions about Thoroughness and Independence of Inspector General’s Investigation into Drilling Moratorium Report Hastings sends letter to IG and releases documents received by Committee to date WASHINGTON, D.C., May 10, 2012 - House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (WA-04) today sent a letter to Department of the Interior’s Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall expressing deep concern with the thoroughness of the Office of Inspector General’s (IG) investigation into whether an Obama Administration report that recommended a six-month drilling moratorium was intentionally edited to incorrectly state the views of peer reviewers, and with the IG’s...

U.S. Rep. Connie Mack, running in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, has been urging the public to sign his petition calling for the Keystone XL Pipeline as part of his efforts to promote more domestic drilling. "I have always said that I would be for drilling," Mack said at an event this month promoting the petition. "But I think that's an issue the state should have a say in — in determining how far it's going to be off the coast of Florida. We ought to allow the state to have a say in that decision." [SNIP] Mack campaign...

Energy Policy: The administration claims there's no "silver bullet" to lower gas prices and that they've kept rising in the face of higher domestic production, as if the law of supply and demand has suddenly been repealed. It hasn't, and increased production on private and state lands doesn't blunt the impact on prices when 94% of federal onshore lands and 97% of federal offshore lands are off-limits to oil and gas drilling. A key factor in gas prices is and always has been future supplies and potential disruptions to those supplies. Another is the fact that we are the only...

House committee says Obama administration may have edited 2010 report to favor Gulf oil drilling moratorium The Obama administration was subpoenaed Tuesday for documents that congressional investigators hope would shed light on how a government report was edited to indicate experts endorsed a moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf following the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. Interior Department officials have refused to comply with repeated requests from the House Resources Committee to provide documents that lawmakers say would show if political appointees at the agency or White House were involved in the editing decision and whether it was intentional. “President Obama...

Energy Policy: The Interior Department announces a five-year environmental study of offshore oil sites along the Atlantic coast with possible drilling off the Old Dominion in 2018 — only seven years after a promised lease sale. Despite taking credit for rising oil production on private and state lands he has nothing to do with, and claiming he supports opening up areas for domestic exploration as part of his "all-of-the-above" energy policy, President Obama in fact despises domestic fossil fuel production and moves to block it at every opportunity. During a visit to Norfolk, Va., last week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar...

Many Americans believe that whenever a politician opens his mouth, something pops out other than the truth. But on the issue of energy, this President has really stepped into an issue and now seems able to maintain his political credibility solely with more lies and obfuscation. We live in an age in which America and the rest of the world has a huge need for electrical power – with no evidence of reduced demand on the horizon. Even though our automobiles, appliances, and tools have become more energy-efficient, we have more devices than ever like smartphones and tablets and...

Yesterday the Obama administration announced a delaying tactic which will put off the possibility of new offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast for at least five years: The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur.

Yesterday the Obama administration announced a delaying tactic which will put off the possibility of new offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast for at least five years: The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell notes that a planned lease sale, which the administration cancelled last year, will now be put off until at least 2018. As you might expect, Republicans were not impressed with the decision: "The president's actions have closed an entire new...

President Obama supports job creation, economic growth and revenue generation – except when he doesn’t. Official announcements from his Labor Department reported that the nation’s February unemployment rate is still 8.3 percent. That’s a decent decline from previous months. But the reality is far worse. Most of that job growth was in business and professional services, and half was temporary. Millions of Americans are working part-time or multiple low-wage jobs to make ends meet. Overall, 23.5 million are out of work or underemployed. Factor all that in, and the real unemployment rate is 14.9%, according to University of Maryland...

Soaring gas prices pose a major electoral vulnerability to a President so damaged he refused to celebrate the two year anniversary of his marquee domestic accomplishment. That is why, for the past several weeks, President Obama and his administration have been in damage control mode. At stops around the country, he sought to deflect blame for the pain Americans are experiencing at the pump. President Obama’s basic defense goes something like this: presidents cannot control the price of gasoline, but I have increased domestic oil production and decreased our reliance on foreign oil, so really, when you think about...

Offshore drilling has been pushed further onto Virginia's horizon. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar on Tuesday announced the oil and gas leasing plan for 2012-2017, and Virginia did not make the list. The proposed program includes 15 potential lease sales, with 12 in the Gulf of Mexico and three off Alaska. Virginia's lease sale was scheduled for 2011, but the federal government delayed it until at least 2017 after the April-July 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst offshore spill in U.S. history. Gov. Bob McDonnell, who wanted to use the millions that...