Dan Popeo: Enviros give America its first green recession
The Bear on Jun 16 2008 at 8:22 am | Filed under: Economy, Energy Policy, Environmentalism
America is in the midst of its first green recession, an economic downturn caused in no small part by irrational ideological activism. Thirty years of punitive laws, restrictive environmental regulations, and special interests’ obstructionist lawsuits have come home to roost in our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, escalating fuel prices and the collateral consequences of those costs.
Environmental extremism has long dominated American energy policy-making, and as a result, we are the only oil-producing nation in the world that limits access to its own abundant energy resources like oil, coal and natural gas. How can our leaders beseech other oil-rich nations to increase supply if we are restricting production right here at home? Let’s face it, OPEC is a “Made in the USA” monopoly.
Congressional moratoriums, executive orders, and refusals to approve leasing of federal lands have placed billions of barrels of oil off limits. Federal agencies can’t even do basic geological surveys on federal land to find potential sources of oil.
Environmental protection and oil exploration are no longer mutually exclusive. As the deputy director of the oil and gas division of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources recently said, “It’s undeniable that the environmental impact is far less now than it was 25 or 30 years ago. The footprint is something like one-tenth of what it used to be.”
However, on the rare occasion that the federal government grants approval for oil exploration on public lands, activists and their lawyers bombard energy companies with lawsuits.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
