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The left likes victims. That’s why they dislike Israel so much because Israel refuses to be a victim. Domestically the left wants us to be weak and is happy to be at the mercy of the world’s oil producers. Victor Davis Hanson writes on what we owe to the fracking industry because it keeps us from being victims.
… “Peak oil” — the theory that the world had already extracted more crude oil than was still left in the ground — was America’s supposed bleak fate. Ten years ago, rising gas prices, spiraling trade deficits, and ongoing war in the oil-rich Middle East only underscored America’s precarious dependence on foreign sources of oil. …
… In 2012, when gas prices were hitting $4 a gallon in some areas, President Obama admonished the country that we “can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.” That was a putdown of former Alaska governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s refrain “Drill, baby, drill.”
Obama barred new oil and gas permits on federal lands. Steven Chu, who would become secretary of energy in the Obama administration, had earlier mused that gas prices might ideally rise to European levels (about $10 a gallon), thereby forcing Americans to turn to expensive subsidized alternative green fuels. …
… Fracking has given America virtual energy independence, freeing it from the leverage of unstable and often hostile Middle East regimes. The result is less need to interfere in the chronic squabbling in the oil-rich but unstable Persian Gulf.
Fracking has reduced oil prices and radically weakened America’s rivals and enemies. Desperate oil exporters like Iran, Russia, and Venezuela are short about half the oil income that they enjoyed ten years ago.
The late Hugo Chávez’s oil-fed socialist utopia in Venezuela is bankrupt.
What so far constrains Russian president Vladimir Putin is as much a shortage of petrodollars as fear of NATO. …
IBD Editors celebrate our energy boom. It’s great to have a president who wants our country to be strong and self-reliant.
Last week President Trump announced plans to make the U.S. not just energy independent, but a global energy powerhouse. Too bad everyone was hyperfocused on his tweets. …
… Administration critics, naturally, are determined to downplay this announcement by saying — as both Reuters and CNBC put it, using exactly the same words — that Trump had simply “re-branded efforts … set in motion during the previous presidential administration.”
But the truth is that the difference between Trump and President Obama on energy could hardly be more stark.
While Obama mouthed the words “all of the above” when describing his own energy policy, his administration did everything it could to thwart all sources of energy except unreliable and heavily subsidized wind and solar.
Obama canceled the Keystone XL pipeline; put vast tracts of land and offshore areas off-limits to oil and gas development; denied a permit for a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Oregon; endlessly pushed for huge tax hikes on energy companies; called oil the “energy of the past”; and tried to kill coal with his “Clean Power Plan.” Nuclear power was at a standstill. Even hydropower production dropped 7% on his watch.
It is true that oil and natural gas production took off while Obama was in the White House, but this was despite Obama’s best efforts, not because of them, since those production gains were on private lands. …
More bad news for petro states like Russia and Venezuela. American Interest posts on a major find in the Gulf of Mexico.
An international consortium of oil companies has struck oil in shallow waters off the coast of Mexico in what could be one of the five largest discoveries in the past five years, and among the top fifteen in the last two decades. The find could be good for 1.4 to 2 billion barrels of light crude. …
… This is a big win for Mexico, which two years ago decided to allow private companies to participate in energy projects. If this find turns out to be as significant as early indicators seem to have it, expect even more international companies to get interested.
It’s also yet another reminder of just how off the “peak oil” prognosticators have been. This is a substantive find of easy to process light crude in shallow waters; no fracking or next-gen technological requirements will be necessary to exploit it. Greens may not love it, but the age of oil appears to not quite yet be over.
“Useful Idiots” was the term Lenin used to describe Westerners who were willing to overlook his thuggery and their loyalty to their countries for the idea of a “greater” good. Lincoln Stephens quickly comes to mind. He visited the Soviet Union in 1919 and famously said, “I have seen the future, and it works.” Stephens was not a 22 year-old know nothing. He was 53 years old in 1919 and had been a journalist since 1898. All of this is proof the media has been screwed up for a long long time and fake news is nothing new. Then there’s the NY Times guy in Moscow, Walter Duranty, who lied about the existence of the Ukrainian Famine in the early 1930′s. The Times was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. And to its everlasting shame, the Times still touts that award. Another of the West’s ”useful idiots” was the playwright and journalist George Bernard Shaw. He met Stalin in 1931 and said Stalin was ”a Georgian gentleman with no malice in him.” This for the man who was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.
Daily Signal tells how the Russians are helping finance and colluding with this generation’s version of useful idiots – those who want to stop fracking. As always, the left liberals want our country to be weak.
Forget about allegations of Russian interference in U.S. presidential elections for a moment, or even “collusion” between Russian officials and Trump campaign operatives.
The real action is in the European and U.S. energy markets, according to a letter from two Texas congressmen to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that details what they call “a covert anti-fracking campaign” with “little or no paper trail.”
The Daily Signal obtained a copy of the June 29 letter to Mnuchin from Reps. Lamar Smith and Randy Weber, both Republicans who chair energy-related House panels. (See the full letter below.)
Smith and Weber quote sources saying the Russian government has been colluding with environmental groups to circulate “disinformation” and “propaganda” aimed at undermining hydraulic fracturing. Commonly called fracking, the process makes it possible to access natural gas deposits.
The sources include a former secretary-general of NATO, …
… In their letter to the treasury secretary, Smith and Weber also say the Russians have been able to advance their strategy without “a paper trail.”
They pass along reports that Russia apparently funnels the money through a Bermuda-based “shell company” known as Klein Ltd.
Tens of millions of dollars are moved from Russia through Klein “in the form of anonymous donations” to a U.S.-based nonprofit called the Sea Change Foundation.
The money, the congressmen write, then is moved in the form of grants to U.S. environmental organizations. …
For a reminder of the bullet we dodged last November, we have this quote from a May 2016 Fortune Magazine.
… The front-runner for the Democratic party nomination (H. Clinton) used a debate in Flint, Michigan on Sunday night to oppose fracking anywhere local communities were against it, wherever it polluted air or water, and whenever companies refused to disclose what chemicals they use in the process.
“By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place,” she said. …