Don’t Watch What They Are Doing, Watch the Other Hand –

Don Briggs – Louisiana Oil & Gas Association -

Don’t watch what they are doing, watch the other hand.  With Congress returning from it’s summer recess, all of the attention for the past two weeks, twenty-four and seven, has been focused on “health care reform”.  Like a magician, your attention is drawn to the obvious, not seeing or noticing what the other hand is doing.

For a while it seemed we were lulled into a reprieve on President Obama’s plan to strip the oil and gas industry of the much-needed investment incentives used for attracting investment into the industry. The Obama Administration wasted no time on its return from summer recess to renew the President’s agenda to impose over $31 billion in taxes on the oil and gas industry.

Alan Krueger, the Treasury Department’s chief economist, told a Senate panel, on September 10^th, “To the extent that current subsidies for the oil and gas industry encourage the overproduction of oil and natural gas, they divert resources from other, potentially more efficient investments, and they are inconsistent with the Obama administration’s goals to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and build a new, clean energy economy.”   Committee member Senator Jim Bunning (R-Ky) asked Krueger if the administration was singling out the oil and gas industry as it seeks tax incentive repeals, “That’s correct”, replied Krueger.

Devon Chief Executive Larry Nichols responded by saying, “That’s absurd.  At a time when respected energy studies agree on the need to increase all sources of domestic energy, it makes absolutely no sense to discourage production of our leading sources, oil and natural gas.”  So the debate went, oil and gas executives arguing for the industry’s right to develop the oil and natural gas resources we have and its importance to our nation’s security, while the Obama administration continued with rhetoric inconsistent with the nation’s best interest.

The Administration hides behind its concern for “climate change” when it’s goal is to develop a cap-and-trade system to regulate emissions.  What has not been talked about until just three weeks ago is when The Nature Conservancy published a paper titled “Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United states of America”.  The report asked the very simple question; how much land is required for the different energy sources that power the country?

The “energy sprawl” for nuclear energy is the least invasive requiring one square mile to produce one million megawatt-hours per year.  The most intrusive are biofuels ethanol and biodiesel requiring 500 square miles, while natural gas needs eight, and wind farms 30 square miles.  As Senator Alexander (R-TN) wrote in a recent op, “Let’s put this into perspective:  We could line 300 miles of mountaintops from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Bristol, Va., with wind turbines and still produce only one-quarter the electricity we get from one reactor on one square mile at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant.”

“The Department of Interior must continue to change how it does business and respond to the issues of energy and climate change, which I see as the signature issues of the 21^st century,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Thus…the other hand.