How quickly the new Democratic regime is moving this country left, especially in environmental matters! Late in March, Congress completed action on an “omnibus” or combined bill consist- ing of 160 other bills – legislation that totals 1,300 pages. The president promptly signed this legislation, which pushes the enviro agenda even farther than it had been pushed before.
The bill adds yet another 2 million acres to the federally owned “wilderness areas.” Already, the feds have locked away 107 million acres of our country in this manner, making it virtually impossible to access and use those acres for any- thing of human value or the satisfaction of any human need.
We have now permanently frozen a mass of land larger than Montana! The Census Bureau estimates that there are only 106 million acres of developed land in our entire country. We have now sealed off more land than we inhabit!
Most of the two million acres newly taken from public use are in Wyoming. In freezing the land, the feds have forbidden the citizens of this country from using nearly 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 300 million barrels of oil. Think of that when oil and gas prices spike again, as they surely will.
This is on top of an earlier decision by Obama’s Interior Minister Ken Salazar to cancel 77 oil and gas leases in Utah – leases that had survived seven years of scrutiny by various planning agencies – merely because any drilling work would be visible from national parks over a mile away. Most of the sequestered land is in the oil-shale regions of the country, where there’s 200 years worth of oil at our current levels of consumption.
These are the kinds of unbalanced priorities that will drive national policy for as long as the current gang controls the levers of government. These people live in a fantasy world where windmills will give us all the power we need, and where we will all drive tiny little electric cars made by the People’s Motor Corporation, formerly known as General Motors.
During the presidential campaign, when oil prices shot up and McCain started to pull ahead by promising to open up more of our country for drilling, Obama said that he, too, would support more access to domestic resources. It is now clear that this was one more lie in a series of lies.
Obama promised to consider the option of nuclear power, but he has completely turned his back on it. He promised to end earmarks, but he jammed through a bill with over 8,000 of them. He promised that for every dollar in new spending, he would cut spending by that amount, but his spending bills have been all new spending, with no cuts. He promised transparency, by publicly posting major bills on the internet so that the public could review them for five(!) days before the vote, but he shoved through a huge spending bill (and the SCHIP and other major bills) with no chance for journalists or the public to review them. He promised not to appoint lobbyists to his administration, and then did so repeatedly.
Our dependence on foreign oil will only deepen under Obama, no matter what lies he told about making us energy independent.
