Alaska governor Sean Parnell writes in an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal about the Obama administration’s broader agenda to stifle production of domestic energy resources, while insincerely wringing its hands (my take, not his) about “energy independence”:
As I noted in these pages last year, responsible offshore oil and gas production, particularly off Alaska’s coast, has to be a critical component of our long-term energy security strategy — and so too does responsible onshore domestic production. Yet there are troubling signs that the Obama administration is attempting to stifle — particularly in my state — the critical onshore component of America’s ability to produce its own energy.
The coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) holds up to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil. While this area was set aside by Congress in 1980 for later consideration of whether to permit oil and gas production there, a federal agency is now undertaking a “review” of the management plan of the refuge — a review that seems aimed at laying the groundwork for a wilderness designation that would bar production.
But it is not only ANWR that the Obama administration seems intent on locking up. Federal agencies are also now blocking oil development in the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska. . . .
America, particularly in Alaska, has vast reserves of onshore and offshore oil and gas. The crisis in the Gulf should not be used to implement a misguided strategy that shuts down the opportunities to develop these resources and that further endangers our nation’s long-term energy security.
Read the whole thing here. Or read Chapter 8 of Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America, titled “Domestic Disturbance: Locking up our resources and shutting down the economy,” which explores this insanity in much more detail.