From your link, more excerpts:
"The fact that Americans must cope with ballooning gas prices and energy vulnerability while living in a country with some of the richest untapped energy resources on the planet is an absurdity that can only be accomplished by bad government.
Without opening up more areas to drilling, we have no way of knowing how many more Bakken-sized discoveries are waiting for us. But we do know this. The potential to increase American oil and gas supplies dramatically and become energy secure and independent is real. Increasing oil supplies will lower fuel prices significantly. And the biggest thing standing in the way is the government obstruction.
What’s even more baffling is that these lands are potentially a huge source of revenue for the federal government –revenue that doesn’t involve raising taxes on the American people. Experts in the private-sector royalties industry estimate that implementing commercial standards in federal leasing of oil and gas royalties could bring over $100 billion into the federal treasury over the next decade. Harold Hamm, who discovered the Bakken formation, recently told the Wall Street Journal that with expanded drilling for oil and gas on federal lands, onshore and offshore, “I truly believe the federal government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties." That’s more than the U.S. national debt, $15.4 trillion.
Not content to confine its hostilities to curtailing new leases, the administration frequently demonizes energy companies for political purposes and advocates new taxes and fees on producers. But the United States is already one of the worst places in the world for oil and gas companies to do business. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Steve Hayward writes, “when compared properly with the royalty and tax systems of 29 other nations, only Venezuela extracts a higher take from oil and gas production than the United States.” New taxes will just drive producers abroad even further.
We must embrace an all-of-the-above energy strategy of oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, biofuels, wind, and oil shale if we are to achieve energy independence, lower gasoline prices, power a renewed boom in American manufacturing, and raise government revenues with no new taxes." - NEWT GINGRICH
Thanks for the info, Marguerite!