Posted to Sarah Palin's Facebook page earlier this evening:
Last Friday, former energy trader and now Fox News host Eric Bolling and I hosted a Fox special called “Paying at the Pump,” which offered President Obama solutions to reduce prices at the pump and get our country on the path to real energy security.
A genuine “all of the above” approach to energy independence is, of course, a multifaceted plan. It includes conservation and sensible private sector investment in sound alternative energy, and it absolutely must involve unleashing our domestic energy production. We cannot ignore the need to drill, baby, drill; frack, baby, frack; and mine, baby, mine. Those who are concerned about the environment and our dangerous dependence on foreign oil should encourage the development of natural gas as a clean and plentiful bridge-fuel to a more renewable future. We have enough clean, green natural gas in America to be energy independent for many decades—whether we use it for natural gas cars or natural gas power plants. We also need to look at our oil refining capacity and our regulations there. We must cut the job-killing, anti-domestic energy regulations of Obama’s EPA and IRS which create such burdens and uncertainty. Finally, Eric pointed out that we must do something about the Wall Street speculators. I know this is a touchy issue, but Eric’s points are valid. Obama’s Federal Trade Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission appear to have no teeth in dealing with this because they haven’t cracked down on the president’s friends on Wall Street who are creating unnecessary oil market volatility. Eric suggested that we could reduce the problem of speculation by raising energy margin requirements.
In his press conference today, President Obama seems to have latched on to Eric’s idea of dealing with speculators. But the president proposed an outrageously expensive “fix,” claiming that he needs a boatload of tax dollars and bureaucrats to merely apply common sense to regulating oil trades and enforcing the authority the CFTC was already granted by the Dodd-Frank bill. This is ridiculous, and it’s not enough. Keep in mind that cracking down on speculation is only a small part of the solution. The key remedy is still drilling.
Basically, President Obama’s idea of an “all of the above” approach to energy is really “none-of-the-above” to the resources we use right now to power our economy. Take for instance the Obama EPA’s war against coal production (which he promised when he was a candidate), which will ultimately leave us with higher electric bills and less electricity. Because his cap and trade legislation got sidelined, Obama is now using his EPA to accomplish the same destructive goals by imposing draconian regulations aimed at crippling the coal industry. According to the Associated Press, Obama’s EPA will soon “force 32 mostly coal-fired power plants to shut down and threatens to close 36 others” and will eventually remove from our power grid enough electricity to power 11 million households. Just ask Californians how much fun “rolling blackouts” are. I suppose we can look forward to more romantic candle-lit evenings ahead as America moves backward with less energy, which must be more of Obama’s “leading from behind” strategy. I hope the folks up North have a hearty wood supply for their fireplace warmth, and that those in the Southwest don’t mind sweltering in the summer heat. Air conditioning takes up an awful lot of electricity; and in Obama’s America, energy will be scarce. As Mark Levin has pointed out numerous times, Obama’s policies will ultimately de-industrialize America. More
