While trying to figure out what President Obama’s combative State of the Union speech added to America’s unity, let us ponder a non-presidential event during the last presidential election cycle. In a 2008 “Meet the Press” interview, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, “I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels.” She may have slipped on a banana peel of the mind, or perhaps she really didn’t know that natural gas is a fossil fuel. Either way, it was clearly a harmless error not intended to confuse or deceive.
Apply that to the president’s Tuesday remarks on energy policy. Harmless error or damaging duplicity? Obama tried to take credit for the current jobs and economic success of the natural gas boom:
“We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy.”
The duplicity lies in the weasel word, “safely.” Big Green’s minions insist there’s no safe way to develop fossil fuels and they comprise a lobbying and regulatory roadblock sufficient to heap mountains of delayed and rejected drilling permits on sites properly leased by oil and gas companies. They have Obama’s ear — and apparently the keyboards of his speechwriters.
The oil and gas industry isn’t suffering in silence anymore. The whole industrial sector is furious enough with three years of Obama obstruction and obfuscation to sweep aside the maxim, “Take care not to spit against the wind — or on your regulator.”
Virginia “Gigi” Lazenby, chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, responded to Obama’s hubris, saying “the truth behind the veil is that this tremendous broad-based economic and energy security success is largely in spite of this administration’s, at times, harshly anti-oil and natural gas policies, not because of them.”
Lazenby and everyone else in the industry was still smarting from last week’s outrageous Obama duplicity when he agreed with his Jobs Council on Tuesday and said America needs more fossil fuels, yet on Wednesday killed the Keystone XL Canada-to-Gulf of Mexico oil pipeline project, saying America needs to reduce our dependence on oil.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said, “In rejecting the job-creating Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama today chose to try and save his own job by pandering to his anti-pipeline environmental extremist voting bloc.”
The day Obama killed the Keystone, his re-election campaign released a TV ad titled “Unprecedented,” defending his energy record with all-too-familiar “veils.”
The 30-second ad is running in Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin, all swing states. The fact that Obama ran this ad in these states tells us where his advisers think he’s vulnerable.
Surprisingly, within the past month scientists, trial lawyers and industry leaders have recognized the long-term role of formerly invisible foundations.
Jon Entine, health and risk expert, wrote in the New York Post that New York-based Park Foundation “is the national funding center for anti-natural-gas research and campaigning.”
Two other New York funds are pouring millions into the “anti-fossil fuel obsessives,” Moore Charitable Foundation and the Rockefeller family’s American Conservation Association.
These philanthropies stay below the radar by splitting up their gifts into small grants to small groups, like Park’s $35,000 to the Bay Area activist group, As You Sow and Moore’s $5,000 to Catskill Mountainkeeper.
It’s encouraging to see that more people are becoming aware of where an important chunk of the money is coming from, and what’s really going on behind the political pep talks and bureaucratic bragging sessions.
But the strong reaction from those who live and work in the private sector has given unintended meaning to this year’s State of the Union message.
Perhaps a politically significant slice of the electorate has responded with a new version of the usual “We heard you, and we don’t agree with you.”
And some are saying, “We heard you, and we don’t believe you.”
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
