Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens got a shout-out this afternoon from President Barack Obama.
"T. Boone Pickens, who made his fortune in the oil business -- and I don't think anybody would consider him unfriendly to drilling -- was right when he said that this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of," Obama said at a White House news conference. "We can't place our long-term bets on a finite resource that we only control 2 percent of."
Pickens, on Twitter, replied: "Pres. Obama, thx for plug. 1 point: US #oil demand down but #OPEC oil dependence/threat unchanged. Let's move on #natgas transportation."
With rising oil and gasoline prices, Texas Republicans and others have accused Obama of hampering domestic energy production, making him at least indirectly to blame for higher prices triggered by Mideast unrest.
This afternoon, Texas Sen. John Cornyn accused him of an "all-out assault on domestic energy production.... After two years of pursuing bad energy policies including cap-and-trade, gas taxes, an 11-month moratorium on permits, and rolls of regulatory red tape, gas prices skyrocketed from $1.84 per gallon to $3.54 per gallon of regular."
Not so, Obama insisted.
"Any notion that my administration has shut down oil production might make for a good political sound bite, but it doesn't match up with reality," he said at his news conference.
The administration is, in fact, encouraging offshore drilling, Obama said -- despite complaints of foot dragging after the BP spill led to a moratorium on deepwater Gulf of Mexico. The president said leaseholders themselves been slow to devote resources to exploration. He also voiced support for developing new gas and oil fields, in Alaska (though not in ANWR) and off the East Coast.
He's also willing to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, he said, though apparently only in case there's a serious supply disruption, not merely to ease prices. But none of that, Obama said, is a long-term solution.
"Even if we tap every single reserve available to us, we can't escape the fact that we only control 2 percent of the world's oil but we consume over a quarter of the world's oil," he said.
Pickens, a Dallas investor, has been pushing a "Pickens Plan" to wean the United States off foreign oil, spurring more efficiency and replacing oil with natural gas and wind energy.
As for tapping the oil reserve, he's opposed, too, at least right now.
"Tapping into our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is not the answer. Storing foreign oil for a rainy day is no more of a strategy than stocking your basement with canned goods as a way to avoid a nuclear attack. It's a short term fix for a long term problem," he said.
Source: http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2011/03/obama-cites-t-boone-pickens-in.html
data data politic political collectibles politics 1 the daily politics political liberalism
No comments:
Post a Comment