Weekend assignment
Well, you can do this Monday too but it is time-sensitive!
On Monday the public comment period for the Five-Year Program by the U.S. Minerals Management Service for offshore drilling comes to a close, and your comments can help keep those options open. I wrote a comment to Renee Orr this morning through the YourEnergyOpinion website – it’s definitely easier than doing it via the federal one!
The YourEnergyOpinion site has a generic message but I like to put my own spin on things. Feel free to do the same or use mine – just tell them that “Michael Swartz from www.monoblogue.us wrote this and I agree with him 100 percent!”
(A note to my friends in Delaware – your number for the study cited below is over 15,000 jobs. But you’re still not a producing state.)
Dear Ms. Orr:
I’m taking time from this weekend to write to you about the upcoming Five-Year Program by the United States Mineral Management Service. Certainly you’ve probably been deluged by an avalanche of e-mails, cards, and letters on both sides of the offshore drilling debate, primarily from those who oppose the practice.
But unless they have the means to strap a couple of solar panels to the roof of their Volvo and figure out a way to run it down the highway on cloudy days, we’re going to need oil – and what better place to get it than the good old U. S. of A? It’s not as if we don’t already get a share of our oil from offshore and all thoughtful Americans are really asking you for is the opportunity to allow energy companies to have access to the largest area possible. Besides, the possible $1.7 trillion in revenue to the federal government might just come in handy for President Obama’s agenda.
I have a friend in the business, her name is Jane Van Ryan and she works for the American Petroleum Institute. Naturally they’ve got a vested interest in the debate, but so do I as an American consumer. She sent me a study that API commissioned from PriceWaterhouse Coopers that figured out in my adopted home state of Maryland the oil and gas industry was directly and indirectly responsible for creating and inducing over 78,000 jobs – and we’re not a producing state! That same study estimated over 9 million jobs nationwide are created and induced by this industry, but it depends on the ability to continue exploring for and extracting oil and natural gas, including those supplies locked under offshore areas.
Let’s face it. The big guy in the Oval Office isn’t a large fan of the oil industry. Then again, the U.S. Export-Import Bank promised $2 billion to assist the state-owned oil company in Brazil in doing their own offshore drilling – for a country which gets a large share of its domestic fuel consumption from sugarcane-based ethanol! Meanwhile, Cuba and Mexico regularly drill and explore for oil in the Gulf of Mexico; oil that Mexico in turn exports to us for our use.
While I’ve tried to write this testimony in a humorous light, let me close on a serious note. Personally I don’t think we go far enough in allowing oil and gas exploration and the economic benefits that could accrue from such an effort. Thus, I encourage the Minerals Management Service to allow offshore oil and natural gas exploration and recovery to the fullest extent possible in the upcoming Five-Year Program and consider ways to open up further areas in the future.
Thanks to American Solutions for providing an easy portal for me to share this, because your own website is quite inconvenient.
So now you know what to do, and hopefully the USMMS will come to the right conclusion – otherwise we may be stuck for another five years.
Serving to remember
This was the fourth in my series of op-eds for Liberty Features Syndicate, a piece which originally cleared September 9th.
The impact of a bill signed back in April could be hitting home this week as Americans pause to remember 9/11.
When President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act into law it was noted that, “there isn’t a better or more fitting way to remember 9/11 than for all of us as Americans to voluntarily set aside time on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks to help others in need.” The thousands of Americans who serve in harm’s way on far-off battlefields waging war against Islamic terrorism might beg to differ on that particular point.
Over the previous seven years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the demise of United Airlines Flight 93 in rural Pennsylvania, liberals complained that remembering the events of that fateful Tuesday morning served only to benefit President Bush and Republicans by whipping up a pro-war, hyperpatriotic frenzy. They whined about the 9/11 hangover affecting the midterm elections in 2002 and keeping President Bush in office after 2004. Even with the continuing refusal of television networks to rebroadcast footage of the attacks, once Democrats gained control of the levers of government they sought to further erase the memory of tragedy and give the day a different significance – hence the language in the national service act.
On the other hand, no one needed to create a day of remembrance for the previous infamous attack on America. Just like the events almost 60 years later, a generation of Americans knew exactly where they were when they heard the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and, as their grandchildren would, thousands volunteered to take on the enemies who attacked us. Our steady resolve held through the dark days immediately after Pearl Harbor and victory was attained nearly four years later.
No politician in his right mind would ask that December 7th be declared a day of service, yet that’s what Democrats have achieved in just eight years after a similar dastardly attack we’ll solemnly recall next week. Community service is an admirable goal, of course, but here’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Most people still recall the terror they felt on September 11th, 2001, and there was nothing overtly political about wondering where the next attack would be. Nor were there political considerations in questioning what else in our everyday lives could change, and that feeling was especially true when stricter security measures were put into place at airports and elsewhere to prevent a similar tragic incident. Yet those Democrats who accused their opposite number of exploiting events for political gain are now trying to shift the message in their favor for those very same reasons, even while there is still work to do in eliminating the threat of Islamic terror which led to 9/11 in the first place.
In essence, Democrats are making yet another attempt to return to a 9/10 mentality. The problem for them is that, aside from their liberal ilk, very few buy into the new Era of Good Feeling that Obama and his supporters would like us to believe is on the verge of beginning now that the evil George W. Bush has departed the scene. They can pick any other day on the calendar to ask us to serve our fellow man, but for most Americans September 11th will remain as it should – a sacred day of remembrance for those who have fallen and renewal of support for those who volunteered to fight and avenge what was taken from us.
Michael Swartz is a Liberty Features Syndicated Writer.
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