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.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.

One thought on “Weekend assignment”

Comments are closed.