HOUSE Republican Leader John Boehner

Washington, Jul 14, 2008 - After yet another week without action to increase the supply of American energy to help bring down gas prices, Democratic leaders attempted to regroup over the weekend and craft an “agenda” of ostensibly pro-energy production bills that will actually do little or nothing to increase the supply of American energy.  And, even more laughably, Democrats have for years been actively working against some of the policies they are now proposing.  Let’s take a closer look at the Democrats’ latest “energy agenda,” which could reach the House floor as soon as this week:

I. The first part of their “agenda” – outlined by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) – would supposedly speed up development of the energy resources in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve (NPR-A).

- This is ironic, given that a provision in the Democrats’ energy bill last year – part of the “Six for ‘06” – actually would discourage development in that same area.

- Even more ironically, given the geological conditions in the NPR-A, extracting energy from the small portion of the desolate “10-02” area of the Alaskan coastal plain, better known as ANWR – where Republicans also support more energy development – will actually require a smaller footprint to get the same amount of oil as can be found in all of the NPR-A.

 
II. The second part is the thoroughly discredited “use it or lose it” proposal.

- Use it or lose it is already current law, in part because Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Majority Leader Hoyer, and Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall (D-WV) all voted for it in 1992.  Under current law, energy companies are already required to utilize acquired leases within a five to 10 year period or the Interior Department Secretary has the right to revoke the lease.

- When an energy company gets a lease, there is no guarantee that there is oil or natural gas present under the leased lands.  If oil is present, exploration, siting, and development can take up to a decade before any new energy is produced.  So the land Democrats are talking about either has no recoverable energy resources, those resources are currently being developed, or they have already been developed.

- Democrats have been utterly unable to say where they came up with the claim that oil companies are sitting on 68 million acres of federal lands without drilling for oil or gas on any of it, or how they arrived at the amount of oil they claim could be found on those 68 million acres.  Despite requests from Republicans to Speaker Pelosi and Chairman Rahall, Democrats still refuse to divulge the how they obtained these numbers.  Did they just pull them out of thin air?

III.    The third part is even more utterly pointless.  As Leader Hoyer described it, “[W]e are going to reconstitute a ban on the export of Alaskan oil.”

- First of all, the United States is not currently exporting Alaskan oil, so “reconstituting” the ban is unnecessary.

- If the Democratic leaders truly are serious about keeping more oil in the United States, they should embrace the GOP-led measure to open just 2,000 acres of Alaska’s desolate 19 million acre coastal plain to energy exploration, because the bill expressly prohibits the export of oil produced from that remote Arctic region.

IV.    Hoyer also described the final part of the Democrats’ “agenda,” promising, “We will be calling on the President to finish construction of natural gas and oil pipelines from Alaska as soon as possible.”

- Great.  Republicans certainly support finishing these projects, but writing the equivalent of a postcard to the President will not speed the process.  Using the sort of authority the Republican Majority granted to the executive branch to finish construction of the border fence would.  Democrats should work with Republicans to do it.

In the weeks leading up the Independence Day District Work Period, Democratic leaders tried a similar dodge, putting together another “agenda” of pointless legislation.  The attempt blew up in their faces as only one of the bills – the inconsequential “bus fares for bureaucrats” legislation – got through the House.  When will the Democratic leadership admit that their “drive small cars and wait for the wind” energy plan is utterly bogus and begin to work with Republicans on their “all of the above” plan to increase the supply of American energy and help lower prices at the pump?