In his June 18 speech on America’s energy crisis, President Bush blamed Congressional Democrats for obstructing offshore drilling, but he refuses to use his own executive power to remove shackles that have been put on Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) drilling.

The President’s energy speech first made note of the obvious: "For many Americans, there is no more pressing concern than the price of gasoline. Truckers and farmers and small business owners have been hit especially hard. Every American who drives to work, purchases food, or ships a product has felt the effect."

President Bush then stated:

In the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil. And that means we need to increase supply, especially here at home. So my administration has repeatedly called on Congress to expand domestic oil production. Unfortunately, Democrats on Capitol Hill have rejected virtually every proposal -- and now Americans are paying the price at the pump for this obstruction.

It certainly is true that the Democrats and their militant enviro-Marxist allies have done everything possible to stifle, strangle, and stop every practical, economically feasible form of domestic energy production. Oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydro power — which are the realistic sources of energy for most of our present and immediate future needs — have all been under sustained attack for decades. The self-anointed "Greenies" insist we must switch to so-called renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, hydrogen, geothermal, and biofuels, all of which combined can only provide a small fraction of our energy needs.

President Bush called on Congress to implement a four-step program to increase domestic oil production, to wit:

• Lift the legislative ban on oil exploration in the OCS.
• Repeal legislation blocking oil shale leasing on federal lands.
• Permit drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR.
• Expedite the refinery permitting process to allow construction of more oil refineries.

All of these are sound proposals, and long overdue. Opening up the OCS, oil shale, and ANWR for development would give American consumers access to hundreds of billions of barrels of domestic oil, enable us drastically to cut our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, and greatly boost our domestic economy.

However, while pointing at Congress, President Bush refuses to use the powers he already possesses to get the ball rolling.

As we pointed out a year and a half ago when Congress was wrangling over OCS drilling, President Bush could "unilaterally open up some OCS exploration and development by simply canceling the executive moratorium put in place by his father and President Clinton. He has had the power to do that for the past six years, but has not done so."

He still refuses to do so. As the June 18 Reuters story we linked to at the beginning of this news feed reported: "The White House said Congress should lift the moratorium first and then Bush would end the executive order because presidential action alone would not lead to new offshore drilling."

President Bush, like many Republicans in Congress, is trying to appear to be in favor of developing our domestic hydrocarbon energy sources, while at the same time burnishing his "green" image for the environmental lobby. The Bush

Whitehouse website boasts: 

President Bush announced the "Twenty in Ten" initiative in his 2007 State of the Union address. Congress responded to this challenge and passed and the President signed, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), which mandates that fuel producers use at least 36 billion gallons of biofuel by 2022.

These federal biofuel mandates are adding enormously to the cost of gasoline and diesel, as well as to the skyrocketing costs of food, as feed corn is turned into fuel, and farmers plant corn to cash in on the federal ethanol subsidies instead of planting food crops. Ethanol subsidies may end up costing taxpayers a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next 15 years. And as reported by The New American and now admitted by even many former advocates in the "green fuels" movement, ethanol and other biofuels are not as green as promised. Producing them is costly and inefficient, and huge tracts of farmland, forestland, and animal habitat are being plowed under as unintended consequences of the government subsidies.

With gas prices already putting real hurt on the economy, American consumers are calling on Congress and the White House for relief. The only real relief the government can provide, is to undo the harm it has already done! Which means removing the shackles that it has put on domestic energy production. Voters must demand that President Bush start the process by removing the executive orders that he, President Clinton, and President Bush, Sr. have placed on OCS drilling. Then they must further pressure the President and Congress to repeal the wasteful, costly biofuel mandates, and the restrictions that are keeping us from extracting oil and gas from the OCS, ANWR, and the giant oil shale deposits on our federal lands.