BY STEPHEN MOORE

President Obama is expected to seek another $250 billion or so in new stimulus funds next week, with plenty of money for clean energy and the creation of so-called green jobs.

Never mind that no one can seem to find many Americans who got green jobs as a result of the original stimulus spending. Consider two stories.

In the 2009 stimulus, the feds gave nearly $3.2 million in green-energy grants to my county of Arlington, Va., with almost $300,000 used to install solar paneling on the roof of our local library. (Don't ask why the feds are giving one of the five wealthiest counties in America free money.)

Arlington officials boast the project will save $14,000 in annual electricity costs, but the solar panels have a life span of no more than 10 to 15 years. So the feds spent $300,000 to shave at most $150,000 off the net present value of Arlington's electric bills. Some 3,000 counties across the country received federal funds for the same kind of negative-return energy conservation "investments." This is the kind of "clean energy" program the administration wants to expand.

Now for a good energy news story. I recently traveled to Wheeling, W.V., which is 45 minutes down the road from Pittsburgh along the Ohio River and smack in the heart of the old Rust Belt. Unlike most places you go to these days, the town is booming. Defying the national mood, people are optimistic about the future. Why? It's what residents are calling the "West Virginia gold rush."

Except it's not gold, it's natural gas. Wheeling sits atop the famous Marcellus shale formation—one of the biggest treasure troves of natural gas ever discovered in America. With recent breakthroughs in hydraulic fracturing technology, that gas can be extracted at very affordable prices. A few years ago Wheeling farmers and land owners were getting about $50 to $100 an acre for drilling rights. Now they get up to $3,000, plus monthly royalties. What was once a dying town now has jobs and new funds for schools and roads, while West Virginian farmers and land owners are getting rich. The same story of economic revival can be told about counties in Pennsylvania and Ohio sitting atop the Marcellus bonanza.

Even the White House acknowledges that the natural gas deposits in the Midwest and Texas contain potentially 100 years worth of cheap natural gas. Yet as far as I can tell, President Obama has never even uttered the words "Marcellus shale" in a major speech. Incredible.

In early August a Department of Energy advisory panel reported that fracking for natural gas poses risks to air and water quality and so should be subject to tighter regulations—hardly a ringing endorsement. The green movement wants it stopped completely because of dangers to water, even though continued technological progress will reduce these risks.

The White House's hostility toward fossil fuels seems to know no bounds. Exxon has made some of the largest oil finds in a decade, in the Gulf of Mexico, and yet the Obama administration is holding up the leases and permitting process. In North Dakota, an Obama-appointed U.S attorney has brought criminal charges against seven oil companies (with penalties of up to six months in prison) for causing the deaths of 28 migratory birds found in oil waste pits.

According to data from the Federal Reserve Board's Industrial Production Indexes, the oil and gas industry, which the Obama Energy Department loathes, has had more growth in output than any other manufacturing industry in the U.S. from 2005 through 2011. As a reward, the administration is proposing $35 billion in new taxes on the industry to slow it down. Even if we accept the dubious White House claim that all the oil and gas tax write-offs are unwarranted loopholes, a 2011 Congressional Research Service study finds that per unit of electricity produced, for every two cents of tax subsidy to Big Oil, Big Green (wind and solar) get closer to $1 in handouts.

"The environmentalists are for any energy source unless it actually works," notes Stephen Hayward, an energy expert at the American Enterprise Institute. A few years ago the Democrats were all in favor of natural gas at least as a "bridge" energy source. That abruptly changed when the extent of America's abundant natural gas resources became fully known and more affordable drilling techniques opened up a superhighway to energy security. The irony of the green movement's reactionary antifracking crusade is that one of the most important developments in cutting U.S. carbon emissions has come from replacing coal-burning fire plants with natural gas.

So we now have a national energy policy directing our resources away from cheap, efficient and increasingly abundant fuels like coal, oil and natural gas while we channel billions of tax dollars to 500-year-old energy technologies like wind power that can't possibly scale up to power a modern-day industrial economy. That's a shame.

Mr. Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

Occam wrote:




Still making things up Occam?

obama administration cancels oil leases

ExxonMobil Sues Gov't for Canceling Deepwater Well Worth ‘Billions of Barrels’

The President asked the Department of the Interior (DOI) to issue a report on the status of unused oil and gas leases. That report showed that 57 percent of all leased onshore acres and 70 percent of offshore leased acres are inactive – meaning that they are neither being explored or developed.

“It’s driving investment and production overseas,” said Alaska’s DNR Commissioner Dan Sullivan. “That doesn’t help the United States in any way, shape or form.”

Maybe the grownups have stepped in.

Obama Asks EPA to Pull Ozone Rule

As for Obama killing oil exploration, the same areas are open to exploration and drilling that were available under Bush.

Occam wrote:


Big Oil: To create jobs, let us drill more

money.cnn.com/2011/09/07/news/economy/oi...s/index.htm?iid=Lead

Note sure whom to believe on this one... what do the people who make a living pumping oil know??

jdeere5220 wrote:


You can believe the API will say whatever they think will increase their profits - they don't care about jobs. Everyone that wants something is wrapping it in the guise of job creation these days. A few years ago they tried to claim more drilling would lower gas prices.

The industry is not drilling in most of the areas that are already available. If they really cared so much about production and job creation they would just go do it - nobody is stopping them. No, they are saving those sites for the future when oil prices are higher, what they really want is to open areas that are cheaper to drill in so they can increase profits. The impact on jobs would be small as they forego or close the more expensive drill sites in favor of the cheaper ones, and what additional production and jobs that do materialize wouldn't come for years -when employment will be back to normal anyway. But we certainly could increase jobs in many industries by dropping all enviornmental and safety regulations, sit back and watch the country turn into a third world sewer and let consumers and tax payers pay the costs of the environmental and health destruction. Brilliant plan.

Anyway, most of the political resistance is coming from the states that have the most to lose from future BP type events. Ask the gulf coast fishing and tourism industries about jobs. Obama had already approved opening vast areas in north Alaska, Florida's west coast and the Eastern seaboard to drilling prior to the BP spill.



articles.cnn.com/2010-03-31/politics/oba...nergy?_s=PM:POLITICS

But it was put on hold pending investigation into the BP mess. Polls show a majority of Floridians supported Gov. Charlie Crist's call to put a ban on offshore drilling on the ballot.

Obama had already approved opening vast areas in north Alaska, Florida's west coast and the Eastern seaboard to drilling prior to the BP spill.

First, instead of passing a targeted antirecession package, Congressional Democrats crammed the stimulus bill with spending on everything from Head Start and Pell Grants to high-speed rail and renewable-energy projects. The hope was that the legislation would do more than just kickstart a recovery: It would lay a new foundation for the economy, with an electric car in every garage and a Solyndra solar panel on every roof. The result, predictably, was a bill that looked less like a temporary exercise in crisis management and more like the Democratic Party’s permanent wish list.

Second, instead of emphasizing the severity of the recession, the White House offered sunny — and, as it turned out, wildly mistaken — projections about how swiftly the stimulus would bring down the unemployment rate.

Finally, instead of pivoting from the Recovery Act to deficits and entitlement reform, the Democratic majority spent all of its post-stimulus political capital trying to push both a costly new health care entitlement and a cap-and-trade bill through Congress.

This editorial in the NYT revisits everything that was wrong with the Porkulous bill (i.e. the Recovery Act) and describes Obama's remaining options. Basically it's hope for a "do over", or what they should have done 3 years ago:

www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/opinion/the-p...ents-do-over.html?hp