Politics: The president stages a photo-op in Oklahoma to take credit for the portion of the Keystone XL pipeline that doesn't need his approval and for oil production on private and state lands beyond his jurisdiction.
If one of his aides some morning remarked on a particularly lovely sunrise, it wouldn't surprise us if President Obama responded with a "thank you," so gifted is he in taking credit for successes that he has nothing to do with and that occur despite, not because, of his policies.
So it will be Thursday, when Obama is scheduled to appear in Cushing, Okla., known as the pipeline capital of the world, to take credit for the southern half of the Keystone XL pipeline, a project announced weeks ago by TransCanada, the Keystone builder.
It's the section that doesn't need presidential or State Department approval since it does not cross an international boundary.
The part that does require State Department approval and a presidential blessing, and which holds as much as 24 billion barrels of oil, runs from the rich oil sands of Alberta, past the booming oil fields of the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota and down to Cushing. It is the portion Obama killed in January.
He killed it, Obama says, because those rascally Republicans tried to make a political issue out of gas prices and were trying to "rush" approval of a project without giving him time to study it further.
This, despite the fact that the project had already been studied for three years. Environmental concerns that had already been addressed by TransCanada's rerouting of the pipeline around sensitive aquifers needed to be addressed, Obama claims.
But now this has become a political issue as voters wonder why we're sitting on a 200-year supply of oil as prices spike above $4 a gallon and head towards the European levels desired by Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Hence the photo-op in front of an oil complex where Obama will claim he is doing a lot while he is really doing nothing.
The president will say he is "expediting" the permit process for the southern portion of Keystone XL, the emptiest of gestures. We already have some 55,000 miles of safely operating pipelines, most of which required state and local permits, not presidential hot air, to proceed.
If the president wants to expedite permits, how about doing that in the Gulf of Mexico, where oil rigs are leaving and businesses are going bankrupt due to a glacial permitting process that is a de facto moratorium by over-regulation? He could free up Gulf production tomorrow.
Meanwhile, Obama takes credit for increased production in places such as the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas, the Permian basin in West Texas where the feds seek to protect an endangered lizard and the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. They now make up 40% of the nation's land-based oil production that the administration has had nothing to do with.
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service says the U.S. has at least 163 billion barrels of recoverable oil. That's enough to meet all U.S. needs without importing any for more than 50 years. And as technology advances, so too will our "proven reserves."
When combined, our recoverable endowment of oil, natural gas and coal is the largest on earth. When all U.S. resources (even without abundant shale oil) are aggregated, we see the U.S. has more fossil fuel reserves than any other country in the world (see chart).
And President Obama is the only leader in the world keeping them under lock and key.
http://news.investors.com/article/605139/201203211855/obama-keystone-xl-pipeline-photo-op-.htm?src=IBDDAE&p=2
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