As the price of a gallon of gasoline has soared to previously unimaginable heights – it’s $4.27 here – Republican politicians have been pushing the same cockamamie idea: It’s not the big oil companies’ fauly, and it’s not oil speculators, and we don’t need more efficient technology in our cars, and we don’t need to conserve. The magic solution, according to these Republicans, is to turn federal lands into giant oil drilling operations.
The Republicans say that the reason the price of gasoline is so high is that Democrats have blocked plans to drill for oil on public lands. If only more federal protected wilderness was opened up for oil drilling, they say, the supply of oil would go way up and the price of gasoline would go down to the low levels it was before George W. Bush entered the White House.
This week, Oregon Congressman David Wu took to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and offered a dead-on response to these Republican claims that inaccessible oil in America’s public wilderness is to blame for high gasoline prices. Wu explained that the big oil companies already have access to huge areas of federal protected land… and they aren’t even using that access. Representative Wu explained,
“Republicans claim that we could lower the price at the pump if we would only approve more and more drilling leases. That is their rhetoric. Here are the facts. Oil companies do not need new areas to drill. They need to focus on areas that are already opened to them. Of the 42 million acres of Federal land currently leased by oil and gas companies, only about 12 million acres are actually being drilled to produce oil and natural gas.”
How about that: Oil companies are only drilling on 28.5 percent of the federal land already available to them. If there is a supply problem having to do with fossil fuels on public lands, it’s a problem of the energy corporations’ own making. The oil companies have been given huge opportunities to drill in America’s wilderness already, and they haven’t taken advantage of them.
If the oil companies are so inept that they can’t use the resources already available to them, why should the American people give big oil even more handouts?
I bet they’re waiting to drill there until the price of oil gets even higher, so they can rake in even more profit$.
These leases were GIVEN to Big Oil by the corrupt Bush administration and their packed departments (which work for corporate America now – not us), while they trash the planet for profit, kill polar bears and wolves without remorse – a clear indicator of how psychopathic these neo-cons are – and the same goes for our troops and the Iraqi and Afghani citizens caught in their imperialistic drive to grab more oil.
Oil does not occur under every piece of dirt in the US. If it did, we would all have oil wells in our back yards making us money. Thankfully, many of these leases are on unproductive land. Oil is too valuable to be used as a source of private vehicle fuel. For the foreseeable future I don’t see any alternative for air travel, and those products made from petroleum are a vital part of today’s society. Let’s preserve our oil for those purposes. Let’s not push the oil companies to drill more in their existing leases. We will need that oil for our children’s children.
Ignorance is rampant. Yes, the oil companies have been handed many leases. But as one comment stated there is not oil under every inch of ground. And the tree huggers have made it so costly to get to some of the oil located on these lands that Gasoline will need to go far beyond $4 to cover the cost of appeasing these idiots! Get real people. We eat animals in order to survive. If relocating or killing off a few to survive in our culture today, then do it. And quit being a bunch of sissies!