The American Spectator

Still another distracting argument is that the oil companies already have millions of acres in oil leases, so why don’t they just produce more oil from those areas? The oil companies pay for those leases for exploration. There is no guarantee that any leased areas will actually hold producible oil. Given that the oil companies must pay rent for the term of those leases regardless of whether any oil is produced, and that the price of oil is at record, unprecedented, historic levels, any oil company that was not producing all it could from any of its leases would be subject to shareholder lawsuits for waste of corporate assets. It is just like liberals to demand that oil companies produce more from areas that do not hold any more oil while denying access to areas with massive proven reserves.

Liberals argue that if we would just sell a small portion of the oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that the U.S. government holds in case of emergency, oil and gas prices would fall. So now all of a sudden liberals recognize that increased supply on the market would reduce prices. But any such sales would be a drop in the bucket, and only temporary, likely, indeed, to be reversed later to restore the reserve. So this would have no significant, lasting effect.

Yet another distraction is that we should just increase the required miles per gallon under the CAFÉ standards for the production of new vehicles. This is no answer to the oil and gas price problem because it involves only restricting consumer freedom of choice, and ultimately reducing the American standard of living. It means that consumers should be prohibited from buying the vehicles they want, and instead should be allowed to buy only the vehicles the government wants them to have. The SUV explosion was all about the American consumer wanting bigger, more powerful vehicles rather than vehicles with better fuel economy. There have long been low cost vehicles available for sale in the U.S. operating with close to 50 miles per gallon in fuel efficiency. But consumers have failed to choose those cars, while close to half of sales of new vehicles have been SUVs with low fuel efficiency exempt from the CAFE standards.

IF NOW WITH HIGHER gas prices American consumers want to abandon SUVs and buy more fuel efficient cars, that should be their choice. But the government should not be imposing that choice on them. Yet Barack Obama says on his website that he wants “to double fuel economy standards within 18 years.” That involves an assault on the standard of living of the middle class, which would be forced to give up the big, powerful vehicles they now enjoy for the tiny, little sardine cans that most Europeans drive. In fact, there has been talk precisely of allowing car manufacturers to import into the U.S. the little fuel efficient vehicles that they now make for Europe.

Assaulting the standard of living of the middle class is what Barack Obama is all about. For you can search through all of his position papers, speeches and talking points and not find a word about reducing the price of gas or oil. He clearly has no intention of trying to reduce the price of gas at all. He has said, in fact, that the high price of gas and oil is good for the environment, and the only problem is that the prices increased too suddenly. This is the Marie Antoinette school of energy policy.

Remember Obama’s famous quote:

“We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert, and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just 4 percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead. We’ll be fine. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.”

What he means by this is that the current standard of living of the American people is unfair. It represents massive inequality in comparison to the rest of the world. So here we have a leading Presidential candidate who thinks truth and justice requires a reduction in our opulent middle class living standards. Good luck, and good night.