The world is a complicated place. Oil prices go up and down with no reason or predictability. Either inflation or recession runs rampant across the globe. Governments are helpless. They either print more money, which causes more inflation, or regulate the situation into another recession. Stability seems a thing of the past.
Oil prices soared to the highest level in more than two years as violence spiraled out of control in Libya and Moammar Gadhafi’s grip weakened, threatening the country’s sizable oil exports and raising concerns that violence would spread to other major oil producers in the Middle East.
Libya holds the most oil reserves in Africa and is the 12th-largest oil exporter at 1.53 million barrels per day, according to the Energy Information Administration. Analysts said the world’s economy could function without Libya’s exports, which provide about 2 percent of world oil consumption. The main concern stalking markets is that revolts in the Middle East and North Africa will spread to OPEC heavyweights, particularly Iran, the group’s second-largest producer.
Recently, numerous publications have reported on numbers showing that despite supposedly lifting his offshore oil-drilling moratorium, the Obama administration is maintaining a de facto drilling ban by slowing and sometimes stopping permit issuance all together. GNO Inc., an economic development agency serving the 10-parish New Orleans region, found that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement 
is issuing 3.8 fewer shallow-water drilling permits per month since August than it was the year leading up to the oil spill. Worse, no new deepwater permits have been issued since May.
Obama is obstructing supply. Why?
Thomas Clements, co-owner of a Louisiana offshore drilling support business, explained in a recent issue of Human Events this de facto drilling moratorium is killing jobs in the Gulf:
Killing jobs, rising gas prices and the depletion of food stocks because this administrations commitment to ethanol are destroying the American economy and leading the Treasury to bankruptcy. This, while Obama supports billions in loans to other countries to boast their oil production as he kneels at the altar of environmental extremism and torpedoes US oil companies.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has recently voiced concern regarding some $38 billion in new taxes on the oil and gas industry proposed in President Obama’s FY2011 budget. Business leaders say those tax increases, if implemented, could threaten millions of jobs, reduce domestic economic output, and create incentives for energy companies to relocate outside the U.S. on a long-term basis.
Barack Obama has never created a private sector job. He doesn’t understand.
In his wisdom, Al Gore recently acknowledged what almost all disinterested observers concluded long ago: Ethanol is a fraud. It has no environmental benefits, and harmful side effects. The subsidies that support its use are an object lesson in the incorrigibility of Washington’s gross special-interest politics. It is the monster that is eating America’s corn crop.
“It is not good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol,” the former vice president said, referring to corn-based ethanol. He called the fuel “a mistake,” and confessed one reason he fell so hard for it is that he “had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa.”
These farmers vote in the first in the Nation’s caucuses and practically insist that their favored presidential candidates drink ethanol at breakfast and hail it as the nectar of the gods.
The Obama administration rammed through an extension of a tax credit for ethanol that costs about $6 billion a year, and with an extension of a tariff on ethanol imports. Ethanol is so uneconomical that Congress supports it three different ways — with a mandate for its use, a tax credit to subsidize it and a tariff to keep out competitors. Rarely are so many levers of government used to prop up one woeful product.
The measures mentioned above have another important impact on the American consumer. They impact directly on food. Wonder why it cost more for groceries than it did a decade ago? It costs more to operate farm machinery, the trucks to transport the raw materials and, more and more corn is diverted to producing ethanol. Corn-based ethanol reduces carbon emissions only 15 to 20 percent per gallon relative to gasoline, according to Madhu Khanna, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics who specializes in conservation and energy policy issues.
In the United States, we are currently using about 15 percent or so of our corn production for fuel production. The federal mandate directs that by 2022 the United States should be producing 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol per year. If we do that, we will be using one-half of the corn produced each year in the United States currently just for ethanol production. Use of corn at that level for ethanol production rather than as food or livestock feed significantly reduces the amount available for export.
Not only do subsidies for corn-based ethanol production create pressures on the food supply, they fail to reduce the emissions that many feel contribute to global warming, said a University of Illinois agricultural economist.
Ethanol is an idiocy that will not die unless Republicans in the House and Senate convince enough conservative Demoicrats to stop catering to the environmental left and start voting for the good of all of America,
The crisis in the Middle East and North Africa — that has brought down governments in Tunisia and Egypt and sparked protests in Yemen, Bahrain, Iran, Morocco and Jordan — has added about $10 to the price of crude, according to Capital Economics.
“An additional $10 on the price of oil is not insignificant, particularly for weaker economies in Europe facing a major fiscal squeeze,” Capital Economics said in a report. “Given the pace at which events are unfolding, it would be daft to rule out a spike to $140 or beyond in the coming weeks, if the unrest disrupts output from the larger oil producers.”
The pace of trading was expected to increase as many U.S. traders come back from a long three-day holiday weekend.
The Messiah Barack Hassan Obama deserts pro-western governments in the Middle East, driving them towards Islamic extremists, refuses to issue drilling permits to US companies while propping up foreign oil companies, says no to coal and nuclear power, and supports corn-based ethanol production thereby driving up food prices in America.
Just what is this guy thinking?
VOTE Republican in 2012!
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