NYT credits Bush, errr, what?

[Quantum Windbag]

The NYT has a pretty good article about the reasons oil production is up in the US. For a change they stuck to the facts instead of making it a partisan issue.

If only we had a president that did the same.

But the drillers in Texas had important allies in Washington. President Bush grew up in Midland and spent 11 years as a West Texas oilman, albeit without much success, before entering politics. Vice President Dick Cheney had been chief executive of the oil field contractor Halliburton. The Bush administration worked from the start on finding ways to unlock the nation’s energy reserves and reverse decades of declining output, with Mr. Cheney leading a White House energy task force that met in secret with top oil executives.
“Ramping up production was a high priority,” said Gale Norton, a member of the task force and the secretary of the Interior at the time. “We hated being at the mercy of other countries, and we were determined to change that.”
The task force’s work helped produce the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which set rules that contributed to the current surge. It prohibited the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act, eliminating a potential impediment to wide use of the technique. The legislation also offered the industry billions of dollars in new tax breaks to help independent producers recoup some drilling costs even when a well came up dry.
Separately, the Interior Department was granted the power to issue drilling permits on millions of acres of federal lands without extensive environmental impact studies for individual projects, addressing industry complaints about the glacial pace of approvals. That new power has been used at least 8,400 times, mostly in Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, representing a quarter of all permits issued on federal land in the last six federal fiscal years.
The Bush administration also opened large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico and the waters off Alaska to exploration, granting lease deals that required companies to pay only a tiny share of their profits to the government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/b...ence-in-america.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=us

 

[Soggy in NOLA]

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and again.

 

[francoHFW]

The Times is ALWAYS fair- that's why it's the internationally renowned newspaper of record of the USA., unlike the BS pub propaganda machine, a JOKE.

Please remember the crony/deregulation/foxes in charge of the hehouse Bushies also end in the worst oilspill/scandal in our history. Now we're doing as much as reasonably possible to make sure that doesn't happen again.The beginning of the article...

Jim Wilson/The New York Times
An Apache Corporation well near Hobbs, N.M. Apache is drilling in the Permian Basin, an oil field once thought played out. More Photos »

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and ERIC LIPTON
Published: March 22, 2012
MIDLAND, Tex. — The desolate stretch of West Texas desert known as the Permian Basin is still the lonely domain of scurrying roadrunners by day and howling coyotes by night. But the roar of scores of new oil rigs and the distinctive acrid fumes of drilling equipment are unmistakable signs that crude is gushing again.
And not just here. Across the country, the oil and gas industry is vastly increasing production, reversing two decades of decline. Using new technology and spurred by rising oil prices since the mid-2000s, the industry is extracting millions of barrels more a week, from the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the prairies of North Dakota.

At the same time, Americans are pumping significantly less gasoline. While that is partly a result of the recession and higher gasoline prices, people are also driving fewer miles and replacing older cars with more fuel-efficient vehicles at a greater clip, federal data show.

Taken together, the increasing production and declining consumption have unexpectedly brought the United States markedly closer to a goal that has tantalized presidents since Richard Nixon: independence from foreign energy sources, a milestone that could reconfigure American foreign policy, the economy and more. In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from a record high of 60 percent in 2005.

“There is no question that many national security policy makers will believe they have much more flexibility and will think about the world differently if the United States is importing a lot less oil,” said Michael A. Levi, an energy and environmental senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “For decades, consumption rose, production fell and imports increased, and now every one of those trends is going the other way.”

How the country made this turnabout is a story of industry-friendly policies started by President Bush and largely continued by President Obama — many over the objections of environmental advocates — as well as technological advances that have allowed the extraction of oil and gas once considered too difficult and too expensive to reach. But mainly it is a story of the complex economics of energy, which sometimes seems to operate by its own rules of supply and demand.

With gasoline prices now approaching record highs and politicians mud-wrestling about the causes and solutions, the effects of the longer-term rise in production can be difficult to see.

Simple economics suggests that if the nation is producing more energy, prices should be falling. But crude oil — and gasoline and diesel made from it — are global commodities whose prices are affected by factors around the world. Supply disruptions in Africa, the political standoff with Iran and rising demand from a recovering world economy all are contributing to the current spike in global oil prices, offsetting the impact of the increased domestic supply.

But the domestic trends are unmistakable. Not only has the United States reduced oil imports from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries by more than 20 percent in the last three years, it has become a net exporter of refined petroleum products like gasoline for the first time since the Truman presidency. The natural gas industry, which less than a decade ago feared running out of domestic gas, is suddenly dealing with a glut so vast that import facilities are applying for licenses to export gas to Europe and Asia.

National oil production, which declined steadily to 4.95 million barrels a day in 2008 from 9.6 million in 1970, has risen over the last four years to nearly 5.7 million barrels a day. The Energy Department projects that daily output could reach nearly seven million barrels by 2020. Some experts think it could eventually hit 10 million barrels — which would put the United States in the same league as Saudi Arabia.

This surge is hardly without consequences. Some areas of intense drilling activity, including northeastern Utah and central Wyoming, have experienced air quality problems. The drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which uses highly pressurized water, sand and chemical lubricants that help force more oil and gas from rock formations, has also been blamed for wastewater problems. Wildlife experts also warn that expanded drilling is threatening habitats of rare or endangered species.

Greater energy independence is “a prize that has long been eyed by oil insiders and policy strategists that can bring many economic and national security benefits,” said Jay Hakes, a senior official at the Energy Department during the Clinton administration. “But we will have to work through the environmental issues, which are a definite challenge.”

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

The NYT has a pretty good article about the reasons oil production is up in the US. For a change they stuck to the facts instead of making it a partisan issue.

If only we had a president that did the same.

But the drillers in Texas had important allies in Washington. President Bush grew up in Midland and spent 11 years as a West Texas oilman, albeit without much success, before entering politics. Vice President Dick Cheney had been chief executive of the oil field contractor Halliburton. The Bush administration worked from the start on finding ways to unlock the nation’s energy reserves and reverse decades of declining output, with Mr. Cheney leading a White House energy task force that met in secret with top oil executives.
“Ramping up production was a high priority,” said Gale Norton, a member of the task force and the secretary of the Interior at the time. “We hated being at the mercy of other countries, and we were determined to change that.”
The task force’s work helped produce the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which set rules that contributed to the current surge. It prohibited the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act, eliminating a potential impediment to wide use of the technique. The legislation also offered the industry billions of dollars in new tax breaks to help independent producers recoup some drilling costs even when a well came up dry.
Separately, the Interior Department was granted the power to issue drilling permits on millions of acres of federal lands without extensive environmental impact studies for individual projects, addressing industry complaints about the glacial pace of approvals. That new power has been used at least 8,400 times, mostly in Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, representing a quarter of all permits issued on federal land in the last six federal fiscal years.
The Bush administration also opened large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico and the waters off Alaska to exploration, granting lease deals that required companies to pay only a tiny share of their profits to the government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/b...ence-in-america.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=us

Most people know the NYT sticks with the facts. Then again, you think FOX News is unbiased in it's reporting.

 

[bitterlyclingin]

["Pinch" Sulzberger musta had a personality transplant. Or leopards sometimes do really, really, really change their spots.]

"Obama’s Energy Strategy: Delay, Deny and Deceive

Today Barack Obama continued his fraudulent energy tour in Cushing, Oklahoma. The purpose of his visit to petroleum-producing areas is to convince the American people that he is a pro-energy, pro-development president. Today Thomas Pyle, President of the Institute for Energy Research, released this statement in response to Obama’s speech in Cushing:

President Obama wants to deceive the American people into believing that he’s somehow responsible for the southern segment of the Keystone XL pipeline, much like he wants them to think he’s responsible for increased oil and gas production in the United States. Neither claim is true, and the president knows it.

The administration has blocked full development of the Keystone XL pipeline, from delays last fall to the outright rejection of the pipeline permit earlier this year. The president wants to reject the pipeline, and yet take credit for approving it. Similarly, he’s closed development of millions of acres of onshore and offshore federal lands for oil and gas production, while attempting to take credit for production increases on state and private lands where he has no role.

Just this week, the Congressional Research Service released a report showing that federal oil production represents 7.5 percent of the total oil produced from all U.S. lands in 2011, despite the fact that the federal government owns more than 30 percent of the lands with oil producing potential.

And the Energy Information Administration released data this month that shows oil production on federal lands is down 13 percent this year under the Obama administration. Natural gas production is at a 9 year low. These energy facts stand in stark contrast to the President’s bogus claims.

Today, the Washington Post “downgraded” the president’s record of truthfulness on America’s vast oil resources. The administration continues to claim that the U.S. only has 2 percent of the world’s oil resources. But according to his own administration’s data, America has 200 years of domestic oil supply at current consumption levels. And that’s not counting Canadian oil that the Keystone XL pipeline would bring to U.S. refineries.

Had the president authorized the Keystone XL permit in January – when he denied it – America would be well on our way to bringing more than 700,000 barrels of Canadian oil on line. That’s more than twice the oil that was produced on federal onshore lands last year, and it could have created as many as 20,000 jobs in the process.

The glaring hypocrisy of the president’s speech today is that he announced that his administration would fast-track approval of a pipeline project that the White House has no control over. And if the president has the ability to fast-track permits, why has he waited until today to use that executive authority? And why only for this project?

This administration’s record speaks for itself. For more than three years, President Obama has implemented a three part energy strategy: delay, deny, and deceive.

Pyle refers to the fact that Glenn Kessler, who writes the “Fact Checker” column for the Washington Post, concluded today that Obama’s constant “2%” claim is worse than he originally assessed it. Kessler now gives “2%” two Pinocchios–still generous, in my opinion. Kessler writes:

[T]he president has not dropped his language since we wrote our column; instead, he has repeated it at least four times.

In fact, in the speeches in Prince George’s County and in New Mexico, he made it worse. As we explained before, “proven oil reserves” has a very strict definition, in part because reserves are considered actual assets owned by companies. The oil must have been discovered, confirmed and economically recoverable, with at least 90 percent certainty.

But in his Prince George’s speech, Obama claimed that even if “we went to your house and we went to the National Mall and we put up those rigs everywhere, we’d still have only 2 percent of the world’s known oil reserves.” In New Mexico, Obama declared, “even if we drilled every square inch of this country, we’d still only have 2 or 3 or 4 percent of the world’s known oil reserves.”

That’s just simply wrong..."

Obama’s Energy Strategy: Delay, Deny and Deceive | Power Line

 

[francoHFW]

^Pubcrappe

 

[francoHFW]

All he had to do was skip the EPA for the GOP BS schedule, ignore the Pub Gov of NE, and screw with the aquifer and the Sandhill Cranes. Imaginary outrage for total dupes...

 

[edthecynic]

The NYT has a pretty good article about the reasons oil production is up in the US.http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/b...ence-in-america.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=us

Funny how when YOU say it, it's true, but when Obama says it, it's a lie!!!

 

[Quantum Windbag]

The NYT has a pretty good article about the reasons oil production is up in the US.

Funny how when YOU say it, it's true, but when Obama says it, it's a lie!!!

I never said it is a lie, I just object to him saying "Under my administration" like he is responsible for it.

 

[Ragnar]

The NYT has a pretty good article about the reasons oil production is up in the US.

Funny how when YOU say it, it's true, but when Obama says it, it's a lie!!!

I never said it is a lie, I just object to him saying "Under my administration" like he is responsible for it.

You dare question the motives of President Algae Solyndra on oil production?

Shame on you.