Bill Clinton Criticizes Obama Admin For Delays In Oil Drilling Permits

WE HAVE TO MAKE OUR GOVERNMENT LISTEN:
"DRILL, BABY, DRILL!"

Today in Washington, D.C. - March 14, 2011:
Senate reconvenes at 2 PM today; at 4:30, the Senate will consider the nomination of James Boasberg to be a district judge for the District of Columbia and at 5:30 will vote on the Boasberg nomination. It will then vote on cloture on the motion to proceed to S. 493, the small business investment bill.

Today at 3:30, Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Rob Portman (R-OH) will hold a press conference calling for immediate action from the president on pending free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama.

President Obama is calling for more background checks on gun ownership. He has an administration filled with anti-gun, anti-second amendment advocates.

The price of crude oil has now reached $102 per barrel. At the pump, gasoline has risen 22 cents per gallon in less than a week as fighting in Libya escalates and the demand for petroleum grows in the United States. Crude oil prices rose $17 per barrel when the Libyan protests began in mid-February, with gasoline in the United States spiking by 25 cents per gallon almost overnight. U.S. motorists are now spending $94.9 million more per day on the same amount of gasoline. In the United States, the U.S. government reported that the demand for oil was rising before the unrest in the Mideast. Now, with oil and gas reserves rapidly dwindling, a memory of mile long lines at gas stations comes to mind.

Cheap oil used to be Mideast oil because it was the least expensive place in the world to drill. That is no longer the case. Yet, the United States is totally dependent on foreign oil even though there is enough oil in the continental United States to supply all of our needs, easily, for the next 300 years. All we have to do is turn on the spigot and start using U.S. oil.

Logic says it's time to drill here, in America, where we have plenty of oil. But the Obama Administration and his buddies---the environmental terrorists---are using environmental regulations they helped create to prevent us from drilling either in the United States or off U.S. shores!

Well, today we note that former president Bill Clinton is more concerned about America than the current administration. Politico reported on Friday, “Former President Bill Clinton said Friday that delays in offshore oil and gas drilling permits are ‘ridiculous’ at a time when the economy is still rebuilding, according to attendees at the IHS CERAWeek conference. Clinton spoke on a panel with former President George W. Bush that was closed to the media. . . . But according to multiple people in the room, Clinton, surprisingly, agreed with Bush on many oil and gas issues, including criticism of delays in permitting offshore since last year’s Gulf of Mexico spill. ‘Bush said all the things you’d expect him to say’ on oil and gas issues, said Jim Noe, senior vice president at Hercules Offshore and executive director of the pro-drilling Shallow Water Energy Security Coalition. But Clinton added, ‘You’d be surprised to know that I agree with all that,’ according to Noe and others in the room. Clinton said there are ‘ridiculous delays in permitting when our economy doesn’t need it,’ according to Noe and others.”

Former President Clinton isn’t alone in admonishing the Obama administration for its “ridiculous delays” in issuing offshore drilling permits. The [New Orleans] Times-Picayune editorialized earlier this month, “On Feb. 17, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman of New Orleans gave the department 30 days to act on five permits that had been pending for between four and nine months. Judge Feldman called that wait ‘unreasonable,’ agreeing with a challenge brought by driller Ensco Offshore Co. ‘The permitting backlog becomes increasingly inexcusable,’ the judge said. ‘Delays of four months and more in the permitting process are unreasonable, unacceptable and unjustified by the evidence.’ Judge Feldman is right.”

And CNN Money recently looked at the ongoing cost of this administration’s foot-dragging on offshore production. “The Energy Information Administration estimated the country would lose 74,000 barrels a day in oil production in 2011 as a result of a six-month drilling moratorium.” But it’s not just energy the country loses out on. Jobs, too, are tied to domestic energy production. “According to the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, over 38,000 people are either directly or indirectly employed by the deepwater drill rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. In Louisiana alone, 320,000 depend on the oil and gas industry for work,” CNN Money wrote. “It's not known exactly how many people have lost their jobs due to the slowdown in activity. . . . But the nation's second largest shallow-water driller, Seahawk, filed for bankruptcy earlier this month, citing a lack of permits.”

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell offered his own critique. “[T]his administration in the last two years has been shutting down wells. Senator Vitter from Louisiana had a whole list of rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and where they have been moved around the world. Bureaucrats making it very difficult to get permits. There has been a conscious effort to make it difficult to drill in this country. Both on shore and offshore by the bureaucrats who have been appointed by this administration and president. Noting that there has been a slight uptick in production doesn't get to the heart of the problem. Sixty percent of our oil is coming from overseas. That's unacceptable.”

Every oil-producing country in the world is drilling in the Florida Keys, Gulf of Mexico, and along the California coast---EXCEPT THE UNITED STATES! Our government is subservient to the fears that environmentalists have raised. It begs the question: Who are the environmentalists in bed with, other than the Democrats?

Drilling for oil here in America would not only reduce our prices and prevent us from being at the mercy of the volatile Middle Eastern region---but it would also BRING JOBS TO AMERICA. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) worked with the North Dakota Geological Survey, a number of petroleum industry companies and independent universities and other experts to study the Bakken Formation in North Dakota and Montana. James Bartis, leading researcher with the study, says America has more oil in this one compact area than the entire Middle East.

The Department of Interior believes that North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3 to 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil in this area, and it could be extracted at an approximate cost to Americans of only $16 a barrel. Royal Dutch Shell believes we could extract fuel from oil shale, a type of sedimentary rock found in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado's Western Slope. Studies indicate there may be more than one trillion barrels of oil in this shale. That is nearly three times the reserves in Saudi Arabia. America would have a sufficient oil supply for the next 400 years.

WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR? Ron Arnold, Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise said today, "The United States can no longer accept the rhetoric that it is cheaper to get oil from our enemies. By depending upon our enemies for oil, the price of oil will erupt like a nuclear explosion. Unless we produce for ourselves, we will soon think that $5 per gallon oil will be quite a bargain. Again, we can thank the liberal environmentalists for slowing our production over the past few years! We must do something NOW. Not tomorrow. Tomorrow will be too late. The oil and oil reserves of America is at risk. The bottom line: WE MUST PRODUCE MORE! We must not "cow down" to the wishes of the liberal environmentalists.  The danger is already here. The oil-producing countries are now substantially at risk due to their march toward freedom (or Muslim Brotherhood leadership). I ask for your very important participation as we urge Congress: DRILL, BABY, DRILL!

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