Senate Energy Committee Approves Obama Energy Secretary Pick

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama's pick for Energy Department secretary won a near-unanimous endorsement from the Senate Energy Committee Thursday, paving the way for his expected confirmation by the full Senate.

The committee voted in favor of Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who sailed through a confirmation hearing earlier this month.

The only senator voting against the nomination was Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, who had pressed Mr. Moniz during that earlier hearing about the department's decision to re-evaluate a nuclear fuel processing program in South Carolina.

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Senate Energy Committee Approves Obama Energy Secretary Pick

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama's pick for Energy Department secretary won a near-unanimous endorsement from the Senate Energy Committee Thursday, paving the way for his expected confirmation by the full Senate.

The committee voted in favor of Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who sailed through a confirmation hearing earlier this month.

The only senator voting against the nomination was Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, who had pressed Mr. Moniz during that earlier hearing about the department's decision to re-evaluate a nuclear fuel processing program in South Carolina.

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Analysis: Colorado BLM failing to enact Obama energy reforms – creating red tape, uncertainty

A stunning new analysis shows striking inefficiencies at work in Colorado that should infuriate anyone looking for a smarter approach to federal oil and gas leasing – including both conservationists and energy companies.

In Colorado, leases sold by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) have attracted nearly three times the number of costly, time-consuming lawsuits (known as protests) than we’ve seen in the rest of the Rockies. Our new analysis found that 76 percent of leases in Colorado were protested, as opposed to 27 percent in surrounding states, on average.

The analysis is based on BLM data recently released for the first time regarding the number of protests in each state filed by citizens and stakeholders on tracts of lands (known as parcels) available for oil and gas leasing. Protests are one of the key measurements for how controversial a particular decision to lease land for oil and gas development.

The reason for this massive discrepancy is clear:

Helen Hankins, the BLM’s top bureaucrat in Colorado, has failed to implement President Obama’s common-sense leasing reforms – designed to streamline the leasing process and reduce conflict dramatically by requiring research and analysis be completed prior to leasing.

A recent report from the Center for American Progress pointed out that:

Those reforms called for a better balance between developing oil and gas resources and the protection of other public lands resources, including nearby parks and refuges, wildlife, and historic and archaeological sites. “There is no presumed preference for oil and gas development over other uses,” states the reform document.

In other words, the reforms were meant to drive our local economies with a real balance between protecting public lands to support and attract high-wage businesses to the West, and using them to produce American-made energy – which together support 100,000s of jobs.

In states like Utah and New Mexico – where the BLM offices are implementing the reforms – protests are down, and energy is being produced. That approach is working for industry and conservation interests – and most importantly our communities and our families.

But in Colorado, Hankins has turned the President’s balanced reforms into a broken promise for our communities. Instead of helping oil and gas companies responsibly develop oil and gas resources in the right places, while protecting those lands that drive the economy and attract new business, Hankins continues to rely on decades-old plans and analyses – proposing to allow oil and gas drilling near places like Mesa Verde National Park, and Dinosaur National Monument.

By miring all sides in expensive red tape, Hankins has failed Westerners who are doing everything they can to get back to work and support their families. They expect their government to champion the Western way of life, including use of public lands in a balanced way to support sustainable economic growth.

The Obama administration must correct this failure by taking action to follow the directives in the 2010 leasing reforms now.

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Obama Taps McCarthy to Lead EPA, Moniz to Head Energy Department

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama Monday announced his picks to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department, selecting a veteran regulator and a noted academic to lead a pair of agencies responsible for driving U.S. energy policies.

Mr. Obama selected Gina McCarthy, the current head of the EPA's clean-air office, to lead the environment agency, an administration official said. For the Energy Department, Mr. Obama nominated Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Ernest Moniz.

Both Ms. McCarthy and Mr. Moniz emerged several weeks ago as the top contenders for these posts, and both must be confirmed by the Senate.

Mr. Obama said Monday at the White House that the pair would lead efforts to do "everything we can" to combat climate change.

The nomination of Ms. McCarthy, a Boston native who served under Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, reflects Mr. Obama's stepped-up focus on climate change.

Ms. McCarthy has pushed through some of Mr. Obama's most controversial environmental rules, including a set of greenhouse gas standards that critics say go beyond the scope of the EPA's authority. Her office is currently writing a rule to limit carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants. The rule would effectively forestall the construction of coal-fired units unless new technology becomes available.

The confirmation process could be challenging for Ms. McCarthy. The EPA is a polarizing agency that often attracts criticism from Republicans. Ms. McCarthy herself has been at the center of controversial rules that have been challenged in court, including the greenhouse gas standards.

Even before her formal nomination, some Republican lawmakers were expressing concern.

Mr. Moniz, a nuclear physicist of Portuguese descent, served in the Energy Department under President Bill Clinton. He is the director of MIT's Energy Initiative and sits on Mr. Obama's council of scientific advisers.

If confirmed, Mr. Moniz would play a role in deciding whether to allow energy companies to export U.S. natural gas. In his current role, Mr. Moniz was the co-chairman of a 2011 study that found "there are substantial economic benefits to a global natural-gas market" and said "the U.S. should not erect barriers to natural gas imports or exports."

Mr. Moniz would also lead efforts to advance new nuclear power plants, lower the cost of renewable energy, and boost the energy efficiency of U.S. buildings and appliances -- all goals he has promoted in the past.

He will have to defend those efforts before a Congress wary of government spending and skeptical of energy subsidies after the bankruptcies of some U.S.-backed renewable energy firms during Mr. Obama's first term.

Mr. Moniz will be prepared for those battles, said Phil Sharp, a former Congressman from Indiana who is president of the think tank Resources for the Future and served with Mr. Moniz on a presidential nuclear waste commission. Mr. Moniz's previous government posts have acquainted him with both Congress and the "far-flung operations" of the Department of Energy, with its national network of research labs and nuclear weapons sites, Mr. Sharp said. "He brings a preparation that is probably unusual for the Secretary of Energy."

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Obama 'Will Keep Cutting' O&G Red Tape

In his State of the Union address Tuesday night President Obama pledged to keep cutting red tape in the energy sector and to speed up new oil and gas permits, while also announcing the launch of a new oil and gas sector-funded Energy Security Trust aimed at developing technologies to help wean U.S. vehicles off oil.

President Obama noted that the recent U.S. boom in natural gas had led to cleaner power and greater energy independence.

"That's why my Administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits. But I also want to work with this Congress to encourage the research and technology that helps natural gas burn even cleaner and protects our air and water," Obama said.

American Petroleum Institute (API) President and CEO Jack Gerard welcomed the president's call for more investment in domestic oil and natural gas resources, noting that more development will create jobs and help the United States become an energy superpower.

"President Obama recognized the oil and natural gas industry as a robust economic engine that is investing in American jobs, generating billions of dollars for the government each year, and making our country more energy secure," Gerard commented in a statement Tuesday.

But Gerard noted that 83 percent of federally controlled land and offshore areas in the United States remain off-limits to oil and natural gas development.

To encourage further domestic oil and gas resource development, the president must follow through with implementing a national energy policy, lifting existing restrictions in support of responsible development of our vast energy resources, approving the Keystone XL pipeline, and "standing up against unnecessary and burdensome regulations that chill economic growth."

Energy industry group Western Energy Alliance (WEA) was critical of Obama's address, saying the president was taking credit for the United States' improved energy profile while promising more policies that will continue to counteract his stated goals.

The group also called on Obama to allow the responsible development of oil and gas on federal lands, which would simultaneously create the jobs and energy the nation needs while protecting the environment. WEA President Tim Wigley pointed out that oil and gas companies already deliver 18 percent of U.S. oil and 26 percent of U.S. gas production while disturbing .07 percent of federal lands.

"Time and time again President Obama says the right things publicly when he talks about our nation's energy and economic potential," Wigley commented. "However, while touting the success of increased oil and natural gas production in America, he continues to ignore the fact that those increases are almost exclusively on state and private lands, and that federal lands are not keeping pace."

Barclays Capital views the president's commentary – which included an allusion to an energy trust, support for oil and gas drilling permits, and potential for government-directed investment in modern pipelines and research and development overseen by the Department of Defense and Department of Energy – as positive for further development of the nation's hydrocarbon resources, particularly natural gas due to its low carbon and abundant care, said Barclays analyst James C. West.

The president spent little time discussing geopolitical threats in his speech, underscoring an ambitious second-term domestic agenda and waning public support for foreign intervention.

The president's speech also avoided mention of changes in tax provisions for oil and gas companies such as intangible drilling credits, which Obama has threatened to repeal. The plan to set up an Energy Security Trust to redirect oil and gas revenues into alternatives research "comes as no surprise, given the administration's pre-existing alternative energy focus," according to an analyst research note from TPH Energy Research.

While the president cited low natural gas prices as the reason for lower energy bills, he called for more investment in alternative fuels, including the divertment of oil and gas tax revenues to fund transportation fuel alternatives, said GlobalData's Global Director of Energy Resources and Consulting Matt Jurecky in a Wednesday statement.

Jurecky noted that major issues related to the oil and gas industry such as progressing hydraulic fracturing regulation, approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, and U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, went unmentioned in the address.

"An absence of these issues from the administration's agenda and their lack of priority mean that the private sector will be required to continue leading the charge on replacing crude imports from unfriendly nations, advancing safer drilling of unconventional reservoirs, and creating a mega-industry in natural gas," Jurecky commented.

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Declare War On Climate Change. We demand President Obama and Congress accept Climate Change as an enemy of the people.

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Liberals Back to Giving Obama a Pass

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“Now that Obama appears poised to push substantial parts of Social Security and Medicare over the ‘fiscal cliff’—in exchange for a paltry, largely symbolic, increase in the top marginal income-tax rate—we might ask whether liberals will once again rise to Obama’s defense, no matter how indefensible his actions,” writes John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine.

MacArthur recites the usual litany of Obama’s offenses—the insults from members of his inner circle (White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel called liberals “retarded”), the deaths of Middle Eastern women and children by drone strikes, and his repeated willingness to auction off what could be and what remains of America’s social programs—all of which falls short of Obama’s modest reputation as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side.

MacArthur argues that Obama’s followers see only what they want to see: a well-meaning, white-guilt assuaging, African-American liberal who may—not will, but may, in the crucial conditional tense, as Robert Borosage put it in a recent Nation article—be pushed to sell the American welfare state to overstuffed corporations.

Liberal pundits have the habit of speaking about Obama’s worst potential future offenses as if there is some reason to doubt he will commit them. The future is debatable, but the president’s capitulations in the debate over the Affordable Care Act, which included immediately abandoning the push for a single-payer health care system, stand as strong evidence that Obama’s first concern is appearing to the American public and future generations as a leader who tried his best to honor the liberal tradition that elected him.

The president’s not a fighter, MacArthur points out, and he’s a poor liberal politician:

As Robert Caro’s latest installment of his Lyndon Johnson biography relates, a very regular, organization Democrat like Lyndon Johnson can makes good things happen if he puts his mind to it. When in the wake of the Kennedy assassination “wise” advisers told the new president to go slow on civil-rights reform — “that a President shouldn’t spend his time and power on lost causes, no matter how worthy those causes might be” — Johnson replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

John R. MacArthur at The Stream at Harper’s Magazine:

Obviously, Obama isn’t anything like what liberals have fantasized; his alliance with the reactionary, pro-corporate Daley machine should have made this obvious from the start. And some on the left appear to know it, even as they beg their hero to behave more like the “progressive” they imagined him to be. The current issue of The Nation recycles Borosage’s oddly innocent tone with a cover story titled “How to Save the Democratic Party” in which L. R. Runner correctly states the obvious: “Progressives and principled liberals need to face an essential truth: the Democratic Party, as now constituted, is no longer an agency for realizing their ideals.”

But then Runner lets Obama and certain important Democrats off the hook: “The problem is not President Obama or any other individual leader, but the Democratic Party itself.” What does this mean? That Obama has no capacity to act? That the corrupt and malevolent Max Baucus (D.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, doesn’t influence tax and trade policy and didn’t write “Obamacare” to favor insurance companies? That New York senator Charles Schumer (D.) doesn’t represent Wall Street’s interests on Capitol Hill? These days liberals seem to flee confrontation with anyone who calls himself a Democrat. Thus we see virtually no primary challenges from the left, no threats to bolt the party, hardly any public protests, and no boycotts of the Democratic Party’s fundraising apparatus.

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Obama Jokes about High Gas Prices, Drilling

kyoder Friday, March 16, 2012 - 3:48pm Loading the player ... Tweet 252 views Embed Embed CodeEmbed Type: iFrame ObjectSize: x (Width x Height)  Preserve Aspect Ratio? Rating Select ratingPoorOkayGoodGreatAwesome Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

President Obama jokes about gas prices saying, 'they're a few spots we're not drilling' such as the National Mall... or at citizens' houses...

(h/t FoxNation)

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