Bush administration officials agreed that greenhouse gases could endanger the public and should be regulated under clean-air laws, but later reversed course amid opposition from Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the oil industry, a congressional report said.
William Yeatman
The national debate over opening more offshore areas to oil and gas exploration has begged the question: Just what are the companies doing with the tens of millions of acres they're already leasing from the federal government?
President George W. Bush this week rescinded the executive order that his father President George Bush signed in 1990 prohibiting oil and gas exploration in 85% percent of the Outer Continental Shelf surrounding the lower 48 States. He then challenged Congress to remove the congressional moratorium on oil and gas exploration in those OCS waters that has been in place since 1982. He should have done this a long time ago, but now it’s up to Congress to drop the moratorium and then up to the next administration to put some offshore leases up for bid. Don’t hold your breath (see next four items).
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wisc.) said this week that he didn’t see any point in trying to pass appropriations bills for the various departments of government until the Republicans on the committee led by Rep. John Peterson (R-Penna.) dropped their demands to hold a vote on lifting the congressional moratorium on OCS oil and gas exploration. The fact is that the House Democratic leadership opposes increasing domestic oil production and favors importing more and more of the oil that we consume. They also support higher gasoline prices in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but of course that is not something they can say out loud.
The House again failed to pass the Drill Responsibly in Leased Lands (or DRILL) Act, H. R. 6515, by a vote of 244 to 173. The Democratic leadership brought the bill up under suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds vote. They did that so Republicans could not offer an amendment to open OCS areas to oil and gas exploration. The DRILL Act would prevent oil companies from bidding on new federal leases unless they were producing oil on the leases that they already hold. With oil at $140 a barrel, the oil companies have every incentive to produce as much oil on the leases they have already paid for as they can. But there are obstacles: it takes years to get through the permitting process before you can start drilling and then environmental pressure groups file lawsuits, which can take years to resolve. And even after exploratory wells are drilled, there is another frequent obstacle to producing oil: no oil is discovered. See Oil Leasing 101 below.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is going to try to bring a bill to the Senate floor next Tuesday that would go after oil speculators who, it is claimed, are driving up the price of oil. Republican leaders are demanding that votes be allowed on amendments to open OCS areas to oil and gas exploration, so my guess is that it’s unlikely that Reid will move forward. I don’t know what role speculators have played in driving up the price of oil, but there is a simple way to end any speculative bubble: open up federal OCS areas and ANWR to oil and gas exploration. The prospect of increased oil production would bankrupt speculators who have bet the farm on ever higher oil prices.
As the price of oil and natural gas soars, many customers are looking to coal as an alternative fuel. That means a boon for suppliers — and a potential bane for the environment.
The next blow from high energy prices could come in the dead of winter.
The nation's frantic search for crude-oil sources is leading to one of the oldest, richest and most-elusive prizes in the petroleum industry: oil shale.
Now that an executive-branch ban on offshore oil exploration has been lifted, the time has come for Democrats in Washington to lift their own ban on increased domestic supply. Americans are demanding that Congress do something about record-high gas prices. They recognize that prices will not go down unless supplies go up. And they also know that the only thing now standing in the way of more domestic supply is the Democratic refusal to allow it.
Former Vice President Al Gore harnessed his star power Thursday to push global warming to the forefront of election politics, challenging the nation to embark on an Apollo-style project to convert all electricity production to wind, solar and other renewable energy within 10 years.
The price of European emission permits is rising so rapidly that German companies are threatening to leave the country. Thousands of jobs could be lost. And the environment may, in the end, be no better off.
The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming "incontrovertible."
In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."
The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity – the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
CEI.org