Free Republic

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Okay. I mentioned the plummeting oil price, and there are a lot of people trying to figure out, why is this happening? There are a lot of people that do not understand what it is that's driving down the crude oil price. What explains it? When it happens and it's a mystery, people look to traditional explanations, "Well, are people driving less? Is the demand for gasoline down? The economy bad? What's going on?" And in this case that's not the answer The simple explanation for much, not at all, but for much of the drop in...

No one with a brain needs to be convinced that America has a dangerous dependence on foreign oil. With an irresponsible Congress spending what we can't hope to make tomorrow, the United States stands at a crucial and historic moment. Rather than curbing economic and entitlement lusts, and promoting domestic, exportable resources, our country seems to be led by fiddlers watching from the rooftops while torches are being set all around. If such fiddling seems hyperbolic, take the Obama administration's devastating decision to hamper America's efforts to get off foreign oil. The denial of the Keystone XL -- a major...

President Barack Obama says shifting the U.S. away from imported oil and toward cleaner forms of energy will add momentum to a trend that has led to 1.8 million new jobs in the past 13 months. Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday to promote his ideas for bringing down gasoline prices by decreasing U.S. dependence on foreign oil. A blueprint he outlined in a recent speech calls for increasing domestic oil exploration and production, making cars and trucks more energy efficient and building vehicles that run on alternative fuels or electricity.

Fortunately for all of us, the wise energy policies of the Obama administration have us well on the way to a sustainable, secure energy future for our nation. After all, who could argue with a policy where we seek to import less oil from abroad, stifle the domestic production of such resources and do nothing to replace the shortfall?With that in mind, surely nobody would expect a result like this.The lack of effective leadership on this vital issue has drawn the ire of a group of conservative leaders who recently provided a summary of just what we can expect in...

Economic despair reigns in America, as stagnation and mounting debt make our future look hopeless. Yet America is uniquely positioned to rebound and recover our economic preeminence. All that is necessary is a political decision to reverse our energy policy and stimulate domestic production of hydrocarbons. From that would flow a true economic stimulus that would mend many of our ills. The United States is again, for the second time in less than three years, being reminded of its absurd dependence of foreign sources of energy, most notably, oil. The upheavals in the Middle East have driven up the cost...

Barack Obama has finally become a wartime president. Unfortunately, the enemy happens to be an oil com pany. Talk about missed opportunities: In Tuesday's Oval Office speech, the president could have addressed a genuine national-security imperative -- specifically, the need to stop showering billions of US petrodollars on America's enemies: Iran, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia . . . Instead, he talked about oil economics -- and got it all wrong. Obama started channeling George "Bring It On" Bush last week, promising some presidential butt-kicking in response to the BP spill. Likening the accident to 9/11, he said it was "assaulting our...

It should be interesting to watch the loons on the radical left as they go through all sorts of mental and verbal gymnastics trying to justify buying oil from terrorist nations, after this hard hitting bit of writing by Sarah Palin! Remember when Bush and the evil Darth Cheney were in office? Hollywood and the radical Marxist-communist-environmentalists were running television ads and producing You Tube videos telling us that SUVs were the greatest threat to mankind ever, because they used gasoline, and that gasoline, …. wait for it …. funded terrorism! Oddly enough, now that they have one of their...

Energy Policy: The advisory board on offshore drilling says it never endorsed a moratorium, which was added later by the interior secretary. The only thing transparent about this administration is its lies. Experts brought together by the Obama administration to review offshore drilling safety were asked to review recommendations in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. They did not give their blessing to the six-month drilling moratorium announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and have accused him of deliberately appending their report to make it seem like they did. According to the New Orleans Times Picayune, Salazar's May 27...

Deja Vu: In a Carteresque speech Wednesday, the president said we should tax our way out of despondency and dependence on fossil fuels. The American dream isn't slipping away. It's being stolen by big government. It might as well have been President Carter addressing the audience of students and faculty at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. Instead it was President Obama who spoke of our dependence on fossil fuels and blamed everybody and everything, except for a lack of presidential leadership, for our current situation. On July 15, 1979, President James Earl Carter gave what has become known as the "malaise"...

Auto Safety: As a Toyota Prius with a stuck accelerator races down a California freeway, no one mourns the victims of the fuel economy standards imposed by Congress. Forced into smaller cars, thousands have died. We can barely imagine the panic felt by James Sikes, 61, as his Toyota Prius accelerated uncontrollably while he drove down Interstate 8 in San Diego County. We can imagine the continuation of the grandstanding by the owners of "government motors" as they further browbeat a competitor of government-run GM and Chrysler. We do not minimize the safety issues here that need to be addressed,...

The BP Spill: Tuesday on Capitol Hill, oil executives were subjected to the Senate's latest show trial. Senators did not say the accident in federal waters was a federal responsibility or that nature spills more oil every day. The morning hearing by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee chaired by Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and the afternoon session before California Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environmental and Public Works Committee prove White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's dictum that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste — especially when your goal is exploiting the Deepwater Horizon disaster...

As Rahm Emanuel said, never waste a crisis. And that is now playing out with the oil spill in the Gulf Coast. In what is the first political TV advertisement to highlight the oil spill in the Gulf Coast region -- and apparently the first explicit politicization of the accident -- MoveOn.org has a new TV urging President Obama to reinstate the ban on offshore drilling. ("The Ban" video at link)

Energy: The administration has banned new offshore drilling until the Gulf oil spill is investigated. Was its heart in it anyway? It seems environmental concerns apply only to certain forms of energy. No one pays much attention to the aquatic "dead zones" that have appeared off our shores at the mouths of our rivers due to agricultural runoff created by mandates for corn-based ethanol. Ethanol is green energy, good energy — never mind that such biofuels drive up food prices, increase hunger around the world and damage the environment in their own way. The explosion that blew apart an oil...

Energy: As the administration loosens restrictions on domestic energy development and offshore drilling, a reviled company develops technology to unlock America's vast shale resources. Drill, baby, drill. We have been among President Obama's harshest critics when it comes to the administration's overly restrictive energy policy, so we were pleasantly surprised to see him announce on Wednesday some light at the end of the pipeline. Some light, for many restrictions will remain in an energy policy best termed schizophrenic. Speaking at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., Obama announced the welcome news that his administration will let lease sales go...

Future Fuels: Our secretary of energy pushes bio-refineries and windmills to oil executives at an energy conference as the administration announces a three-year offshore drilling ban. This is a policy for economic suicide. They don't qualify as an official group of victims, but carbon-Americans, as they have been called, did not have much to cheer about last week, when Energy Secretary Steven Chu addressed CERAWeek 2010, a premier industry conference hosted by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. With an economy struggling to regain sound footing, Chu advocated a starvation diet devoid of additional fossil fuels that are to remain under...

Energy: A new study shows that our reluctance to develop domestic energy will cost the beleaguered U.S. economy trillions in opportunity costs, reduce our gross domestic product and increase our trade deficit. From trying to stimulate jobs in nonexistent ZIP codes at great expense to worshiping the false gods of climate change, our biggest deficit these days may be in the area of common sense. A new study shows that many of our wounds are self-inflicted as we forgo the wealth and jobs to be found in our waters and under our feet. The study by Science Applications International Corp....

Energy Policy: The chief economist of the International Energy Agency says the world is running out of oil. We've been told that for the last 150 years. The only thing we're running out of is the will to drill.Ever since the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pa., in 1859, experts have been predicting we would soon run out of oil. The latest is Dr. Fatih Birol, chief economist for the International Energy Agency in Paris, whose job it is to assess future energy supplies by OECD countries. In an interview with the Independent, Dr. Birol says that based...

Energy The administration asked for public comments on a plan to expand offshore drilling. When they came in 2-to-1 in favor, the Interior Department sat on the news. Time for a "Texas tea" party? When you ask for public comment on a major policy issue, at some point you should make the results public, not hide them until you can figure out a way to spin the public reaction to support a conclusion you've already drawn. On its last business day in office, the Bush administration published a proposed draft of a five-year plan to lease areas in the Atlantic...

One of the most disappointing aspects of the Obama Administration’s domestic policy has been the way it has dealt with domestic energy production – in particular new offshore energy production. It took oil prices reaching $147 a barrel for President Bush to tear up the moratorium on offshore energy production, but at least when he did, he quickly moved forward with the regulatory process to give Americans access to these energy sources—and the jobs this development would create. The Obama Administration, on the other hand, would be hard pressed to move any slower than they already have, never mind what...

As so-called "cap-and-trade" legislation winds its way through Congress, many Americans want to know how they their country's energy future might be impacted if the legislation becomes law. Because the mainstream media isn't being too honest about the topic, they have to find alternative sources of information, including the blog you're reading now. Another good source for insight about this dangerous legislation is the Institute for Energy Research.