Posted by
Bob on Sunday, February 03, 2008 11:54:35 AM
Is the plummeting Dollar, now further threatened by hot-money outflows likely to result from the Fed's rate cuts, also coming under irresponsible attack by our own Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service through its unwarranted proposal to list the polar bear as an endangered species?
The polar bear is not endangered, and there is no scientific basis for the proposed listing. The government of Nunavut, in Canada's Northwest Territory, still allows hunters to kill up to 500 polar bears a year to preserve other wildlife on which the bears feed. So is this a new plot to kill domestic energy development in Alaska? A proposal has just been entered in the Senate to stop the Chukchi Sea oil and gas lease sale offshore Alaska planned for early February, the first since 1991, until the polar bear is listed and the sale is killed.
But let's consider the consequences. The US Energy Information Administration reports that last year's US Net Petroleum Imports averaged 12,390,000 barrels per day. Multiply this by 365 days per year and the total is 4,522,350,000 barrels per year. Assuming a cost of $90 per barrel, last year we would have paid our foreign providers a whopping $407 BILLION!!! We also ran a foreign trade deficit of $711 Billion, so these petroleum imports accounted for up to 57% of a huge bill that is killing the dollar exchange rate and continuing to escalate the cost of imports, including energy. Can we afford the possibility of $200 oil and $6 gasoline maybe soon, as the Dollar's value plummets and a higher price is naturally demanded by foreign suppliers?
We could reduce imports significantly by producing far more petroleum product domestically, but much of the prime federal lands in the US western states, Alaska, and the continental shelves are locked up and off limits to drilling thanks to pressure from the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society and Greenpeace, among others. What does it take to alert their members to the terrible damage these destructive policies are doing to our economy and to the future living standard of their members, too.