According to the Jan. 24, Wall Street Journal, President Barack Obama will focus part of his State of the Union address on energy security and the "benefits of increased U.S. oil and gas production." [1]
This is almost laughable given Obama's many anti-energy decisions in the past three years as president. As recently as Jan. 18, his administration rejected TransCanada's bid to extend the Keystone pipeline by "linking the tar sands of Alberta to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico [2]." The $7 billion Keystone XL project [3] would have created thousands to tens of thousands of jobs in the U.S., and boosted American energy security.
According to the Institute for Energy Research, the rejection will cost more than jobs. IER president Tom Pyle said in a press release [4], "Since his original delay, President Obama has now ensured that American consumers to spend nearly $5 billion on overseas oil when we could be developing and utilizing our own vast resources in North America. [5] With more than 1.7 trillion barrels of recoverable oil under our soil, we have enough oil to fuel our present needs for the next 250 years."
The liberal news media have given Obama a pass [6] while he presided over huge increases in the cost of gasoline [7], from $1.84 the day he was inaugurated to $3.38 on Jan. 24. He instituted a drilling moratorium [8] on deep water and shallow drilling that lasted six months following the Deepwater Horizon spill. There are now fears that pump prices may reach $5-a-gallon [9] in some places, according to a Jan. 16 CNN.com story.
"After two federal courts said the moratorium was illegal, the Obama administration instead moved to a de facto moratorium, by issuing no permits, while speeding up the permitting process for wind farms [10]," The Heritage Foundation wrote back in December 2010.
The Obama administration, through the Environmental Protection Agency, has also waged war against the coal industry [11], while the broadcast networks ignored it. While at the same time, the administration has promoted huge subsidies for "green" energy [12] for companies including Solyndra which have proven to be huge failures and massive wastes of taxpayer dollars.
National news outlets have often sided with the left when it comes to energy issues. They've berated oil executives, promoted calls for windfall profits taxation of oil companies, made accusations of price gouging and spread conspiracy theories about oil and gas. They rarely cover the coal industry [13] except when accidents occur.
In 2008, the Business & Media Institute also found that despite a change in public attitudes toward nuclear power, broadcast news outlets were persistently silent [14] on the topic years after stoking fears of nukes [15]. Recently, the media have begun to go after hydraulic fracturing, a method used to release natural gas from rocks deep underground.
