« Profiles in Moonbattery: Donald Sutherland | Main | The Elephant in the Newsroom »
October 05, 2005
If You've Got to Curse Someone...
Annoyed at how much it costs to fill up the tank? Maybe the oil companies who make it possible to fill up your tank at all aren't the right ones to blame. From an op-ed by George Melloan in The Wall Street Journal:
Environmentalist lawsuits and political interventions that caused long construction delays for nuclear power plants, making bridge-financing costs prohibitive, have effectively blocked nuclear expansion for a quarter-century, a period when France, for one, built enough plants to furnish most of its electricity, cleanly and safely.
Fossil-fuel energy hasn't fared much better than nuclear in the face of environmental activism. When Hurricane Katrina battered Gulf Coast refineries and drilling rigs last month, Congress wanted to know why the oil and gas industry had concentrated so much of its infrastructure in a region well-known for storm devastation. Red Cavaney, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, gladly provided the answer in a letter to Congress: "Government policies have largely limited offshore exploration and production to the Central and Western Gulf… Unfortunately, offshore oil and natural gas development has been barred elsewhere — including the eastern half of the Gulf and the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts."
In short, the message to the politicians is that if consumers are complaining about high energy prices, they should blame Congress — and the environmental lobby, of course — not the oil industry. Mr. Cavaney could have gone into much greater detail about the many ways oil refining has been fettered, including the requirement to produce "boutique" varieties of gasoline blends to meet the strict emissions requirements of certain states and metropolitan regions that have fallen under heavy influence of the enviro lobby.
On the positive side, drilling restrictions are said to benefit caribou in some undefined way.
Like it? Thank an environmentalist.
Posted by Van Helsing at October 5, 2005 04:34 PM
Comments
I like this one better.
Posted by: Von Oyster at October 6, 2005 01:53 PM