One sure way to lower gas prices
John Kerry was in San Diego, Calif., this week, where motorists face the nation’s highest pump prices. The Democrat presidential nominee told the locals the Bush administration was to blame for their $2.16 a gallon gasoline.
“If the gas prices keep rising at the rate they’re going now, Dick Cheney and George Bush are going to have to car pool to work,” said Kerry. “Those aren’t Exxon prices,” the Massachusetts senator continued, “those are Halliburton prices.”
Kerry suggested if he were sitting in the Oval Office — rather than Bush — America would be awash in cheap fuel. And he laid out his plan to ameliorate the present run-up in gas prices and to prevent future price spikes.
The Democratic Party standard-bearer said he would pressure the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to increase production, although the last two Democrat presidents to try such a tactic — Carter and Clinton — had little success.
Kerry also proposes to suspend crude oil deliveries to the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, ostensibly to increase the supply of oil available on the domestic market.
The Democratic presidential candidate says he would streamline the “patchwork” of 300 state and local fuel regulations across the country that make it infeasible to shift gasoline from areas of the country where supplies are higher to areas where supplies are lower.
Finally, Kerry says he would mandate that one-fifth of the nation’s fuel supply consist of so-called “alternative” and “renewable” fuels by 2020.
But Kerry doesn’t get it. The reason Americans are faced with gasoline price spikes every several years or so is not because of OPEC, not because of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, not because of the crazy quilt of state and local fuel regulations, not because alternative and renewable fuels have been given short shrift. It’s because this country has done far too little to increase domestic crude oil production.
As recently as 1990, some 405,000 American workers were involved in exploration and production of oil and gas. By 2000, their numbers had dropped to 293,000. In 1990, there were 657 working U.S. oil rigs. By 2000, there were only 153.
The United States is sitting on an untapped oil supply that could replace 30 years worth of U.S. oil imports from Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis. But because of hysterical opposition from environmental activists, Kerry and his fellow Democrats in Congress have absolutely refused to allow any oil development whatsoever in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alaska.
Under energy legislation approved by the House way back in 2002, oil companies would have been allowed to drill for crude in the coastal plane of the refuge. The footprint would have amounted to a mere 2,000 of the refuge’s 19.5 million acres. To put that into perspective, the refuge is larger than the combined land area of San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, Imperial and Ventura counties.
Under the energy legislation, the acreage opened to drilling would be no larger than the size of Los Angeles International Airport. That hardly would have amounted to a blight on the refuge.Yet, candidate Kerry continues to oppose opening up the Arctic refuge to oil development, no matter how many billions of barrels of oil lie beneath its 19.5 million acres. “The United States can’t drill its way out of this predicament,” he said this week in San Diego.
Well, as long as this nation consumes 20 million barrels of oil a day, there’s got to be some drilling somewhere. We can restore domestic oil production to what it once was and enjoy more stable fuel prices.
(Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].)