excellent commentary
rushlimbaugh.com
It is my contention that bureaucracies and courts and so forth have been the architects of energy policy: forty different formulations of gasoline which causes not a supply problem, but a distribution problem. No refineries in the last 15 or 20 years. We can't drill anywhere else in this country. We're dependent on foreign sources. We've got plenty of supply of oil underneath the water bodies that surround the country. We can get it. But there are people that refuse to let us. You can't do it. It's anti-progress. It's pollution. It leads to global warming. "We need alternative fuel sources!" Well, we are in an emergency. We are in a dire emergency, and there are people who have been profoundly affected by it in ways that they never dreamed. There are people who are say they look at these pictures and they see a Third World country. Well, let me tell you something: America is not a Third World country, and the American citizen does not want to live in a Third World country and the American citizen is not going to put up with it, and when these people get past the shock of all this, they are going to want to rebuild and they're going to want to return home and they're going to want to return to normalcy, and these cities are going to want to rebuild, and everything that was there is going to want to go back in one form or another, and who's going to stand in the way of the progress? The militant left. The environmentalists are going to oppose anything we need to speed this up. They're going to oppose the drilling for more oil. They're going to oppose the building of more refineries -- and in the process they will illustrate for us that it is they who are the obstacles. It is they who are the obstacles, not just to progress, they are the obstacles to replacement. They are the obstacles to simply getting back to where we were. It's not just progress they are against. They are against a return to normalcy, and you know damn well that they will provide obstacles that they will oppose. The president could do a number of things. The president...
I wish he hadn't released the strategic reserve. I wish instead what the president would do, would by executive order temporarily suspend all these environmental regulations that retard development and retard drilling and retard distribution, such as these 40 different formulations of gasoline and all these other things and let the oil companies that want to drill, drill, and let the refinery owners that want to build and expand, build and expand, and let the pipeline builders who want to build more pipelines, build the pipelines, and let's get this going -- and let's also temporarily rescind all the taxes on fuel and gasoline. If we're worried here about people not having enough, there are ways we can do this. The strategic oil reserve is a PR move, but that oil is going to have to be replaced. That oil that's in the strategic reserve now was bought at $35 a barrel or $30 a barrel. It's now going to have to be replaced at a price twice that. It's not necessary. We don't have a supply problem. We do not have a supply problem. The problem with the release of the reserve is that we've got plenty of oil; we've got plenty of gasoline. We don't have a way to get it anywhere especially since the Port of New Orleans is now not functioning and the whole Gulf Coast -- which is not a resort area, it is a working coast. Do you know that one-third or two-thirds of the grain produced in this country goes down the Mississippi River on barges to the Port of New Orleans for its distribution elsewhere? Not only in this country but the around the world. The costs of distributing that grain are going to have to be found, or the methods are going to have to be found in other ways and the costs are going to skyrocket.
There's going to be a domino effect of this, and it's not going to just affect the Gulf Coast. It's going to affect all of us at some point, some way, somehow -- and when that begins to happen, people are going to say, "It's not necessary. There are things that we can do to alleviate the situation -- production, distribution -- and there will be people who will oppose this," and in the process of opposing it they will show themselves as who they are: The obstacles of progress. They will demonstrate they are the real problems, not fossil fuels, and not the oil companies, and not the refineries, and not the shipping and the tanker owners who ship this stuff around the world. It's not the Saudis, and it's not OPEC. The biggest problem we have to plentiful energy supplies and distribution can be found right here in the American militant economic left, and there's no greater opportunity for this to be displayed to all the people of this country than right now, and it wouldn't take much for the president to do it. As I say, just temporarily, by executive order, rescind some of these onerous regulations and restrictions to free up the natural movement of supply that we already have and the natural distribution, because you wait and see. You know, there's a story in the Atlanta paper today that there's a shortage, potential shortage of jet fuel and gasoline in the Atlanta area because a pipeline that comes from the Gulf Coast has been affected by this, so they're going to have to find alternate ways in. I don't know that you can bring enough jet fuel in by tanker trunk every day to keep all the airplanes coming in and out of the Hartsfield on schedule. That's all that they would have to allow on the highways is tanker trucks of jet fuel coming in and out of there just to keep airplanes. And you wait 'til this starts affecting people that don't live in that area and you'll see the domino effect of this, and you'll find out that it's not. They're going to call it a shortage of fuel, by the way, but it won't be. It's a distribution problem that we're going to have. The internet, by the way. I have a little site that takes me on the Internet that shows the routes all over the country and the route from Atlanta to Houston yesterday was shut down because it runs right through where you know where, right through this area that got hit. So the Internet, if you were sluggish yesterday it was because a whole leg of it nationwide was inoperable. It's going to take awhile to get that back up. You just wait and see, folks, this is not a supply problem here, and it need not be. It's one of distribution, and there's any another ways of dealing with this that will have an added benefit for the future.
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