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Environmental lobby feeding Americans lies

The Delaware County Times, PA

Letters: Environmental lobby feeding Americans lies

To the Times:
I would like to thank Mr. Edward Perry for his editorial on July 26. It gives many examples of the myths and outright lies the environmental lobby feeds the American public. 
First, I have not seen any ads from “Big Oil” demanding that Congress let them drill wherever they please. The “Drill Here, Drill Now” campaign was started by Newt Gingrich and his group, American Solutions. They have no connection to oil industry; they simply want to stop sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to people like Hugo Chavez. I don’t know about Mr. Perry, but I would rather give my money to “Big Oil” then somebody who might turn around and funnel it to Marxist Colombian rebels or buy massive amounts of weapons from Vladimir Putin. 
Another fairy tale told to us by Mr. Perry is that America doesn’t have enough of its own oil reserves or the ability to make an impact on the market. 
America has 86 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Outer Continental Shelf. Just last week, a U.S. geological survey announced there are 90 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Arctic, more than all the known reserves of Nigeria, Kazakhstan and Mexico combined, and enough to supply U.S. demand for 12 years.
We also have anywhere from 800 billion to a trillion barrels of recoverable shale oil in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. That’s triple the reserves of Saudi Arabia.
Richard Vinegar, a scientist from Shell, has developed a process to extract the oil without harming the local environment. The Department of Energy estimates Shell could be producing 2 million barrels of oil a day from the region by 2020. The process developed by Dr. Vinegar simply accelerates Mother Nature’s work. Shell drills 1,800-foot wells and into them inserts heating rods that raise the temperature of the oil shale to 650 degrees Fahrenheit. To keep the oil from escaping into the ground water, the heater wells are ringed by freeze walls created by coolant piped deep into the ground; this freezes the rock and water on the perimeter of the drill site. 
Eventually the heat begins to transform the kerogen (the fossil fuel embedded in the shale) into oil and natural gas. After the natural gas is separated, the oil is piped to a refinery to be converted into gasoline.
Mr. Perry also seems confused about how long it would take for domestic drilling to have an impact on prices. (He) estimates it will take at least 10 years, and possibly 20, for Americans to see any savings. I would like for Mr. Perry to explain to us then how the price of a barrel of oil has dropped in two weeks from $144 to $123 ever since President Bush announced he was lifting the executive ban on offshore drilling. Mr. Perry also neglects to mention the financial benefits of domestic oil production. According to the Congressional Research Service, if just ANWR alone was developed, the federal government would see a surge in new revenue – $191 billion dollars. I don’t know about Mr. Perry, but I would rather see this money go to pay off our national debt then help build skyscrapers in Dubai.
Mr. Perry, in his zeal for demonizing “Big Oil,” neglects to mention the cost of the proposed Climate Security Act. The Congressional Budget Office released a report estimating the cap and trade proposal in the act would amount to a $1.2 trillion tax increase over the next 10 years.
The Energy Information Agency also released a study detailing the impact of the proposed Climate Security Act. In its report, the EIA estimated that under the Warner-Lieberman act, the cost of electricity by 2030 would rise anywhere from 11 percent to 64 percent. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce contended the Lieberman-Warner bill’s timetable for greenhouse gas reductions was unrealistic. The burden on the American economy and the massive regulatory bureaucracy that would be the result of a cap and trade system would have a meaningless impact on global carbon emissions without the participation of the world’s largest polluters, China and India.
I do not oppose clean energy technologies. But I think it is particularly foolish not to develop resources in our own country that would have tremendous economic and national security benefits for the American people.
Mr. Perry has his heart in the right place but seems to want Americans to do the economic equivalent of cutting off their nose to spite their face to meet the environmentalist agenda of a world without fossil fuels, which just isn’t realistic at this point in time no matter what Al Gore and his gulf stream jet might tell you. 
We should have been developing our own resources a long time ago, and we are now paying the price for our own inaction. I for one do not want to be having this debate again in 10 years. I urge anyone who truly cares about the future of our country to vote for politicians who allow us to develop our own resources while building a bridge to clean energy economy in the future and who are not beholden to the environmental lobby for massive campaign contributions.
It is time for the environmentalist and their surrogates in Congress to stop treating Americans as children who need to be protected from themselves.
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