Presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says gas prices would return to $2.50 per gallon if he were to be elected.
But not so fast, say his conservative critics.
“Inasmuch as he has any core convictions they are environmentalist, not conservative,” Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tells Red Alert Politics. “Newt Gingrich’s policies are incoherent, so I don’t think he could be trusted to bring the price down of anything.”
Ebell warns that while Gingrich might push policies aimed at increasing drilling, any gains might be offset by other environmental policies that would negate any increase in oil output.
Gingrich aside, Ebell says getting back to $2.50 gasoline could be possible, if the federal government would make the estimated 134 billion undiscovered, yet recoverable, barrels of oil available for drilling.
“The solution is more drilling in the United States and the rest of North America,” Ebell says.
He points to the rapid drop of oil prices in 2008 following the Bush administration’s announcement that it planned to open the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic and Pacific coasts for drilling, to suggest an announcement of increased drilling would create a collapse of oil and gasoline prices.
However, this won’t happen as long as President Obama remains in office.
“The President is being very disingenuous when he keeps saying that more drilling can’t be the answer,” Ebells said.
The President and his allies complain that the United States uses 20 percent of the world’s oil resources and has only 2 percent of the world’s proven reserves. They use this fact to argue the United States should dump oil. However, Ebell argues this number is artificial.
This amount of proven reserves excludes the estimated 11 billion barrels in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge or the billions of possible barrels of oil that remain to be discovered and exploited on the continental shelf.
“There is the potential that we could have 10 percent of world’s proven oil,” Ebell says.
The United States could have in excess of 1.5 trillion barrels of oil locked up in the oil shale deposits in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado – almost more than 6.25 times Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves.
But Ebell cautions that it costs a lot of money to extract the petroleum from the rock because you have mine it and heat it up to get at the oil.
“There could be trillions of barrels of oil there,” Ebell says.
Ebell takes aim at conservative national-security experts like former Reagan National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and former Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey who encourage the development of petroleum alternatives.
“Biofuel is only part of the solution, but it is a solution that won’t work,” Ebell says. “It is closely tied to the price of oil because it takes a lot of petroleum to produce ethanol.”
Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., who chairs the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, shares Ebell’s opinion, saying that green energy only is cost-effective when the price of oil is driven up.
“To alleviate the basic supply issue, more oil and gas exploration is the key,” Shimkus tells Red Alert Politics. “The Keystone XL pipeline[would be] a great way to address the supply issue because the [Canadian] oil sands is the third largest supply of oil in the world, so you don’t have to worry about going through the Straits of Hormuz and the Middle East.”
But he believes the Obama administration is intentionally driving up the price of gasoline, evidenced by comments made by Energy Secretary Steven Chu prior to his taking office, where he suggested that Americans should pay European gas prices, which can exceed $8 per gallon in some parts of Europe.
“The burden falls directly on the poor, and especially the poor of rural America,” Shimkus says. “They are not buying the newer cars and truck with the higher gas mileage.
“When you are in rural America you have to drive everywhere when you don’t have the Metro or other mass transit,” Shimkus continues. “High gas prices attack the poor and the middle class.”
This is also true of recent college grads who typically are unable to afford the costs of newer more fuel-efficient vehicles.
He says environmentalists who reside in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago or Los Angeles live in a bubble and are out of touch with the rest of America where public transit is not an option, and especially with the nation’s poor.
