After a short break, I’m catching up on some things. There have been quite a few energy-related news articles. I’ll discuss them below.
First, from Friday came news that both John McCain and Bob Schaffer have made up quite a bit of ground in polling done on their respective races in Colorado. Gas prices and potential solutions were cited as having influence in the movement. One factor ties the two together: Coloradans’ view that drilling in shale or off the US coasts will have an effect of gas prices. Not enough is being done, in my opinion, to challenge that false viewpoint. The Republican Machine (newspapers, radio and TV) continues to peddle opening up new lands for lease as a mechanism to reduce oil and gas prices.
What’s wrong with that? Oh, just the fact that Big Energy already owns 68 million acres of land which they could already be drilling. Except they’re not. And they’ve owned this land for years now. Had they drilled, more oil and natural gas would currently be available for market. Read closely: they didn’t drill. And they didn’t drill for a reason. See, by purposefully restricting resources from getting to the market at the same time that demand has kept growing, the value of the resources has grown exponentially in the past five to ten years. But the corporate media has absolutely no interest in ensuring citizens know the entire story. How many times have you seen/read/heard about the vast tracts of land energy corporations already own but won’t drill? The only locations I’ve encountered it are on progressive media.
So it doesn’t take much thought to realize that opening up more land wouldn’t do a thing to reduce gas prices. And let’s make sure we’re very clear on this: taxpayers own the land that the Big Energy corporations want. If we lease those lands and they go undeveloped, Americans are poorer for it.
To the point of the articles: if Colorado and other states vote for folks like Bob Schaffer and John McCain, energy prices will not go down. They’ve demonstrated how beholden they are to energy corporations their entire careers. They’re the cause of the gas prices we now pay because they pushed a pro-corporate energy policy. Why give them more time to prevent us from enacting real solutions like moving renewable energy technologies to market and reducing our dependence on foreign fuels?
A vote for McCain or Schaffer is a vote to keep gas prices high. It’s really that simple.
