August 25, 2012 By Nathaniel Downes Creative Commons License Addicting Info
The Romney/Ryan team has at long last released their energy plan. What is inside is disturbing, not just for their gross negligence in making wildly inaccurate claims about the Wright brothers to even failing to grasp when fiscal years begin (a very bad sign for someone running on their business experience). It is clear from reading the document that whomever put it together is attempting to hoodwink the American people with buzzwords and catch phrases, hoping that people don’t actually read the document to understand it.
The first catch phrase he throws around is “Energy Independence.” This is a common Republican refrain, so it comes as no surprise to see it here. What is surprising, however, is that it is now part of a much larger phrase, “North American Energy Independence.” For his plan to work, the US will need to tap the oil from Canada, Mexico, and Central America, without restriction. This of course means the US takes all the oil from them, willing or not. Is Romney planning on a war with our bordering neighbors?
He then talks about eliminating federal controls on federal lands, handing mineral and resource rights over to the states. Of course, when has air or water stopped at state borders? How many people in Florida would be happy when Georgia starts dumping coal ash into the tributaries which flow into the states agricultural basin? Romney is right in that this would grow something, but that would be federal lawsuits and injunctions, causing an already slow permitting process to effectively grind to a complete halt.
He then goes to length in discussing opening up offshore areas for drilling. Not some areas, all areas. Oil rigs off of Virginia’s scenic beaches, within eyesight of the residents of the nation’s capital when they go to the beach. And Virginia is first on Romney’s list for oil exploitation. Oh and the state control of permits would be only for onshore exploitation, all offshore would stay federally controlled, but be fast-tracked for rapid decisions.
One interesting bit of the plan however is that the federal government would “Ensure accurate assessment of energy resources.” The government’s job now would be to find these oil fields, survey them, detail it all out, for the oil companies to profit from. Socializing the costs while privatizing the wealth. This would further increase oil company profits while leaving the US taxpayer the bill.
Of course, new energy is not left out in the cold. Oh wait, yes it is, with the complete elimination of government subsidies and development for anything other than fossil fuel technologies. Bye bye solar, hello coal gas. And cut those clean air standards while we’re at it, cannot do anything to hurt the drive to make a buck.
To back up his positions he turns to energy experts…. no, wait, he turns to banks and investment brokers. With the lions share of his positions backed up not by energy firms, or by experts in the field, we find Bloomberg, Citigroup, Raymond James… not a single piece of industry inside information. He then compared years he called the George Bush years to Barack Obama years to compare permit rates, but then messes those up, giving Obama the last Bush year. Of course the year being given Obama is the Fiscal Year 2009, running from October 2008-September 2009, the last year of the Bush administration’s budget. It also puts the entire economic downturn, with the reduction in permit applications, solidly into an administration which did not even take office for months after the fiscal year began.
Or did he mess up at all, and it is intentionally done that way, lying about Obama’s record in order to make his case to the American people? Considering his earlier declaration of energy independence only if we become economic slaves to Canada and Mexico, or otherwise invade them or annex them to become part of some grand North American Union, I suspect that it is in fact intentional.
Dates do seem to be a problem for the Romney plan, however. At one part he proclaims that “Utah Has Regulated Fracking For Over 50 Years Without A Single Reported Case Of Water Contamination” while neglecting to notice that the page he is citing is referring to limestone deposits, not the oil shale gas fracking which is what the current issues are about. He also talks about the “past four years of Obama’s energy policy” when Obama has not been in office for that long.
The report goes to great length in discussing the natural gas reserves, ignoring that natural gas expansion has been due in large part to Obama’s embrace of the resource since taking office. If you read the Romney plan, it sounded like natural gas exploration was run by private enterprise without any government oversight, then in fact without the governments investment in R&D into gas extraction technologies in the 1970′s and 1980′s, we would not have a natural gas industry today.
And of course, the real enemy for Romney comes out, when he blames environmentalists for all of the woes of the nation. The plan blames them for blocking anything and everything, but even then the examples he cites fails to meet the grade. He cited the Antelope Valley Solar Ranch for being blocked by environmentalists, but doing even quick research revealed that the permitting issue had to do with construction permits due to earthquake codes. Last time I checked earthquakes were not a high level environmentalist issue.
Once we have expanded our resource exploitation, of course, it means energy independence, right? Wrong. In his plan it talks at length about exporting these resources. We’d not even be using them ourselves, but shipping them to India and China, both mentioned by name in the report. All of make more money for the 1%.
In the end, the entire Romney energy plan looks to be little more than big government handouts to big energy, with the US taxpayer put on the line to pay for it all. His plan is short sighted, foolish and most of all demonstrates no loyalty to the United States, making us ever more enslaved to the world market. This is a plan for third world status, identical to a plan you would find for Nigeria. And we all know how well that worked out.
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