Hostility.

There has been plenty of focus on the amped-up levels of cyber-intrusion coming from China’s part of the globe lately, on which the Pentagon finally and officially called them out earlier this month, although they will deny, deny, deny in tones of shocked indignation ’til the cows come home. Not only do the Chinese have [...]

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Squawk.

When it comes to enforcing the environmental laws concerning certain species of federally-protected birds, the Obama administration and their environmentalist allies have been impressively diligent in charging oil companies, coal plants, and power stations when said birds get tangled up in their power lines or drown in their waste pits; in the past five years, [...]

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Why does he make it so easy?

Planet earth’s noble knight never seems to tire of surpassing himself in brazen displays of sanctimoniousness, but it feels like every time he opens his mouth he’s simply offering everyone another opportunity to take him still less seriously. Via The Hill: “There’s no such thing as ethical oil. There’s only dirty oil and dirtier oil,” [...]

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Adding fuel to the fire.

Presumably hoping to light a fire underneath the Obama administration’s fully political dilly-dallying on the issue, the Senate went on record in support of the Keystone XL pipeline with a (frankly symbolic) 62-37 vote on an amendment in March — and now the House is getting ready to move on the (not just symbolic) Northern [...]

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Irregularities.

Environmentalists went into fits of delight when the EPA left some critical comments on the State Department’s draft environmental impact review of the Keystone XL pipeline on Monday (apparently, “the State Department is incapable of doing a proper analysis of the climate, wildlife, clean water, safety and other impacts of this disastrous and unneeded project” [...]

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Grasping at straws.

The White House’s predicted date for when the president will finally approve (or disapprove, as the case may be) the Keystone XL pipeline has been steadily creepin’ back to later and later dates — by the latest count, we’re looking at the end of this summer/early fall — for no sincerely good reason whatsoever, given [...]

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Geniuses.

Do you suppose the eco-trendy crowd really, carefully thought this one through before jumping on the self-righteously outraged bandwagon? I have some pretty severe doubts on the matter, but they’re in this thing, and they’re certainly not going to back down now that they’ve invested so much time, money, and media coverage to the issue [...]

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Opportunities forgone.

The American energy sector has been one of the more powerful engines moving right along in our otherwise largely stalled-out economy in the last few years, a fact that President Obama isn’t hesitant to note — even though the oil-and-gas industry’s growth has largely been due to burgeoning technological innovation and heightened exploration on state- [...]

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Obviously.

President Obama and the Democrats’ calls for more revenue are almost never complete without some kind of shoutout to how we need to end loopholes for those treacherous, evil oil companies, but just a friendly reminder: Oil companies provide for some of the most handsome portions of federal revenue already. To identify the companies that [...]

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Er, just give us minute.

The Obama EPA has made it their especial mission to bring about the demise of the coal industry post-haste, and last year, they announced that they were getting to work writing the first-ever regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants — even though the industry protested that such rules would “make it [...]

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Walking away?

House Republicans’ big meeting with President Obama on the Hill yesterday didn’t yield any sudden changes of heart on reaching some kind of big deficit bargain (shocking, considering how pure and straightforward I’m sure the president’s motives were, hem hem), but the president also kept his cards close to the vest on energy and how [...]

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RIN trading

Filed under the “we hate when we turn out to be right” category, domestic energy producers are facing some tough choices in the coming months thanks for a one – two punch of ethanol and government regulations. A combination of the drought this summer wiping out a fair portion of the corn crop and an [...]

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Yeah, nice try.

America’s domestic oil-and-gas production is going bananas, and it’s largely thanks to advances in technology and expanded drilling on private and state-owned lands. President Obama, however, is pretty fond of implying that the credit for the oil-and-gas industry going gangbusters belongs mostly to his policies. For much of 2012, he deliberately misused statistics that made [...]

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Let's approach this calmly and rationally.

For decades, eco-radicals and Malthusians have been crying wolf at the calamitous and ever-imminent phenomenon of “peak oil,” when extraction reaches its highest possible rate and the wells will start running dry — leading to famine- and war-inducing energy price shocks that will send humanity into an economic and environmental tailspin, so everybody start running [...]

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Truth.

Like Ed noted after Sunday’s rather underwhelming anti-Keystone XL pipeline protest in DC, the project really is a no-brainer across all imaginable fronts — and the Obama administration’s continue stalling is getting politically incorrigible. It’s completely understandable that the president would want to wait to make such a controversial high-profile decision until after the election, [...]

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Mum's the word.

This entire time, I thought that there was hardly a real chance that the Obama administration would ultimately reject the Keystone XL pipeline when it really came down to it. Sure, they’ve been stalling out the wazoo — presumably hoping the PR furor over the proposal would die down a bit, and/or to think up [...]

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Decisions.

While touting his ostensible “all of the above” energy plan and working the campaign trail not so very long ago, President Obama would justify his many expensive green-energy plans by repeatedly saying something along the lines of, “America consumes 20 percent of the world’s oil, but only has two percent of its reserves” — which [...]

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Packing up

This story went mostly under the radar, but it will have some implications for many people on the east coast and for the industry in general further down the line. Without much fanfare, Hess recently announced that they were selling off their last commercial refinery, located in New Jersey. Their stated reasons are clear enough, [...]

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It's not Big Oil, but it's Big

People have been warning us for years that drilling for oil in the Alaskan arctic would lead to big environmental trouble. It’s not that the technology hasn’t advanced to the point where it can be done safely, but those nasty people in charge of the projects just don’t care about the environment. These Mother Earth [...]

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Stall tactics.

A couple weeks back, Nebraska Governor Heineman approved the portion of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would run through his state, obliterating the Obama administration’s last, best excuse for continuing to delay on what has become a politically explosive project. After what have already amounted to years of various reviews with positive results, the [...]

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What's up with that?

The environmental lobby and many greenie activists endlessly use and abuse the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and plenty of other “ecological sensitivity”-protecting laws and regulations as justifications for expanding their agenda, which includes implementing restrictive land-use policies hostile to drilling activities and punishing hydrocarbon-based industries for supposed infractions. The Obama administration [...]

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Well, that's a relief.

…Just what we’ve all been so eagerly waiting for, I’m sure. The U.S. identified about 192,000 acres of government-owned land in Arizona that are suitable for commercial-scale solar and wind farms. The agency also established the Agua Caliente Solar Energy Zone, 2,550 acres in the state with strong sunlight and few resource conflicts that are [...]

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TBD.

During his first term, the Obama administration managed to rather successfully punt on , er, ‘defer for further review processes’ the full authorization of TransCanada Corp.’s proposal to build a 1,700-mile pipeline that would transfer Canadian oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries. The Keystone XL pipeline has been an apt demonstration of some of Democratic [...]

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Double standard.

The environmental lobby has used the Endangered Species Act and its many wildlife-related legal brethren to accomplish any number of their radical goals, including designating lands as untouchable wilderness and bringing the pain on oil and gas companies for any infractions, real or imagined. The golden eagle, the spotted owl, the sage grouse, and etcetera [...]

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About that...

As states up and down the eastern seaboard have raked in the thousands of private-sector jobs and millions upon millions of dollars in revenue that have come from tapping into the oil and gas resources trapped in the Marcellus Shale formation using the hydraulic-fracturing technique known as “fracking,” Maryland has conspicuously declined to get in [...]

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