Posted 7/10/2006
Energy: Starting with Carter, and including Clinton and the current Congress, the blame for three bucks a gallon gas lies with Democrats whose energy policy has been limited to punishing those who look for more of it.
It is said that when you tax something you get less of it. In 1980, President Carter proved that by signing a windfall profits tax on oil companies. According to the Congressional Research Service, Carter's tax reduced domestic output by 3% to 6% a year and increased oil imports 8% to 10%.
Congress repealed the tax in 1988, fulfilling a Ronald Reagan campaign promise. But the domestic oil industry suffered a devastating blow and the country was set on a path of rising dependence on foreign oil. Yet today's Democrats seek its reimposition.
In 1994, when the Republican tsunami hit Congress, Alaskan Sen. Frank Murkowski and Alaskan Rep. Don Young assumed the chairmanships of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and House Resources Committee. They focused on finding more energy, not repealing the law of supply and demand.
In 1995, Young, Murkowski and Alaska's other senator, Ted Stevens, fully aware of the success of Prudhoe Bay and the Trans-Alaska pipeline, attached a rider to a budget bill mandating oil development in a tiny part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
President Clinton, keeping a 1992 campaign vow, vetoed the entire bill largely due to the proposed oil exploration in ANWR.
If Clinton in 1995 hadn't blocked drilling in a few thousand acres of frozen tundra in ANWR, an area roughly the size of South Carolina, it would today be delivering as much as 1.4 million barrels of American oil daily, raising U.S. production by 30%.
Democratic opposition to domestic energy development lives on. On May 25, the House passed the American-Made Energy and Good Jobs Act, marking the 10th time the House has approved drilling in ANWR. Each time, supporters in the Senate could not muster the votes to end any Democrat-led filibuster; 170 Democrats voted against it, only 27 in favor.
The bill will almost certainly die in the Senate, where ANWR drilling was filibustered to death in December after it was attached to the defense appropriations bill . Forty of the Senate's 44 Democrats voted to sustain that filibuster against ANWR.
Also destined to die in the Senate is the Domestic Ocean Energy Resources Act, which would end the 25-year ban on exploiting America's immense offshore energy reserves. Florida Democrat Ben Nelson has promised to lead a filibuster.
Last year, the Senate voted twice on amendments authorizing ANWR drilling to a budget resolution bill (March 16) and a budget reconciliation bill (Nov. 3), neither subject to a filibuster. They needed 60 votes to pass. Forty-one Democrats voted against both. Twenty-three of those were around to have voted against ANWR in 1995.
Congress, with Democrats taking a leading role, has also limited our ability to refine oil and turn it into gasoline. We have not built a new refinery since 1976. After Hurricane Katrina, a bill to streamline the refinery-permitting process and encourage the building of refineries on closed military bases was blocked in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Every Democratic senator, plus Jim Jeffords , I-Vt., and Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., voted "no."
Prudhoe Bay, 60 miles west of ANWR, was also supposed to yield just a "six-month supply" of oil while ravaging the environment — the same arguments used against ANWR.
But Prudhoe recently delivered its 15 billionth barrel of crude in its three decades of existence. At its peak, it produced 2 million barrels a day, more oil than is imported from Saudi Arabia, Mexico or Venezuela.
The Prudhoe Bay oil fields, discovered in 1968, began delivering their first oil through the trans-Alaska pipeline on June 20, 1977. Nearly the entire development process occurred under the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. In 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew cast a tiebreaking vote in the Senate, allowing the pipeline to be built.
When Carter left office in 1981, oil price controls were still in place. His defenders note that he agreed to phase them out. True enough, but he did so only in exchange for a windfall profits tax that led to America's rising dependence on foreign oil in the 1980s.
One of President Reagan's first acts upon entering office in January 1981 was to repeal oil and gas controls. Not coincidentally, 1981 marked the peak in average annual oil prices until 2004.
The difference between the parties on energy is that Democrats want to stick their heads in the same sand the GOP wants to get oil out of.
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