FACES of Coal

A Message From FACES of Coal
As 2009 draws to a close, we would like to thank you for your support of FACES of Coal and your efforts to ensure that lawmakers and the American people understand that coal energizes our nation and fuels our economy.

Since we launched our campaign in August,

• 40,000 individuals have registered as members of FACES of Coal;
• 104 organizations, including chambers of commerce, fiscal courts, manufacturers and retailers, support our coalition; and
• 1,349 lawmakers representing 44 states have received 30,000 e-mails and letters in support of coal.

Washington bureaucrats have still taken no action on dozens of mining permits that have been arbitrarily stalled. Our legislators have still not delivered the balanced energy and economic policy we need and deserve.

The future of coal mining in America remains uncertain, and we need you to continue writing and calling your elected representatives (you can do so now by clicking the link below). Remind them our holiday lights are shining bright because of the affordable electricity generated by coal.

And we can provide good food and gifts to our families and friends in our warm homes, because of the good jobs sustained by coal.

Thank you for your efforts to protect our jobs and secure our future.

We wish you and yours a happy holiday season and a prosperous New Year.

Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security(FACES of Coal)

Click the link below to log in and send your message:

http://www.votervoice.net/link/target/faces39210323.aspx

Drill Drill Drill

Virginia stands to be a leader in the development and use of domestic energy, if the soon to be newly elected Republican majority in the General Assembly, the Senate and the Governor's Mansion have the cajones to stand up to the EPA and government regulations and reaffirm State Sovereignty. Its about states' rights. Its called the 10th Amendment.

We have the right as a sovereign state to take care of our citizens first, and I would expect nothing less from the other 56, ahm, I meant 49 states. The federal government has no authority to impose restrictions or mandates which diminish, or restrict the ability to improve, the standard of living of any citizen, regardless of what the law or regulation was intended to do when enacted.

Family Security Matters has a piece posted today, part of which is excerpted here:

Our future prosperity and freedom are at risk. This is because we have a current energy policy that puts them at risk. We are also contemplating a new energy policy, commonly termed “cap and trade” which could very well push our nation’s economy of a cliff, (my conclusion, not that of Chevron). Mr. Watson started his remarks with a plea that we start with some “facts,” what President John Adams called “stubborn things.”

Over the horizon, we will need to invest some $26 trillion in energy production, transportation, and efficient utilization technology. The U.S. population is growing and so is that of the world. The U.S. and world economy also need to grow to raise the standard of living of people everywhere – to secure the “heat, light and transportation” that we all take for granted said Watson. But over eighty percent of the natural gas and petroleum reserves in the world are in the hands of governments. And 85 percent of such U.S. reserves are off limits to exploration and development.

Watson further noted the U.S. oil and gas industry is responsible for 9 million American jobs and 7.5 percent of our GDP. The challenge of providing an affordable energy supply for more than 300 million Americans is being made all the more difficult by the regulatory ambitions of the U.S. government and its growing debt. Yet most Americans want to be less dependent on foreign supplies of oil that can be manipulated to harm our economy. And they believe we need a stable but diverse energy supply. And they also want to do their responsible part for ameliorating any negative impacts on our climate and environment.

/snip

....the current restrictions on the exploration and development for U.S.-owned fossil fuel resources make so little sense. U.S. oil production has declined by 4 million barrels a day over the past 25 years while demand has grown by exactly that amount – 4 million barrels a day. Thus, although we are the number 2 or 3 producer of coal, natural gas and oil from domestic resources, when we import 8 million barrels of oil daily, (the combined drop in production coupled with the increase in demand), it is at a cost that approached some $450 billion a year when oil hit $147 a barrel.

Yet the U.S. Geological Survey is forbidden by federal law from actually doing an accurate assessment of how much oil and gas we have off of our coasts and on Federal land. And we still propose to tax those oil and gas resources we do produce at a rate far greater than other resources. Add to that the prohibition on exploration, and it is easy to understand how oil exploration and development was pushed overseas and with it the complimentary run-up in U.S. oil imports. Reasonable estimates are that at least 30 billion barrels of oil are readily available off our shores or in places such as Anwar. While we cannot “drill for independence,” said Watson, we can and should “drill for more energy security.”

.

I take exception to the remark that we cannot "drill for independence". Once we start extracting our own reserves and refine those resereves into a marketable product, we become independent. We can sell it, or keep it. Either way, its ours, we own it and we'll do with it as we please.

Krauthammer On Domestic Energy

Krauthammer On Domestic Energy
Weekly Standard via DCExaminer

There are, of course, major threats to the American economy. But there is nothing inevitable and inexorable about them. Take, for example, the threat to the dollar (as the world's reserve currency) that comes from our massive trade deficits. Here again, the China threat is vastly exaggerated.

In fact, fully two-thirds of our trade imbalance comes from imported oil. This is not a fixed fact of life. We have a choice. We have it in our power, for example, to reversethe absurd de facto 30-year ban on new nuclear power plants. We have it in our power to release huge domestic petroleum reserves by dropping the ban on offshore and Arctic drilling. We have it in our power to institute a serious gasoline tax (refunded immediately through a payroll tax reduction) to curb consumption and induce conservation.

Nothing is written. Nothing is predetermined. We can reverse the slide, we can undo dependence if we will it.

There are things to be done. Resist retreat as a matter of strategy and principle. And provide the means to continue our dominant role in the world by keeping our economic house in order. And finally, we can follow the advice of Demosthenes when asked what was to be done about the decline of Athens.

His reply? "I will give what I believe is the fairest and truest answer: Don't do what you are doing now."

This article - condensed from The Weekly Standard - is based on syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer's 2009 Wriston Lecture delivered for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in New York on October 5.

Labels: chares krauthammer, dcexaminer, domestic oil production, drill here drill now, energy independence, national security, offshore drilling, weekly standard

and On the Senate Side

Boxer-Kerry Unveil Their Energy Tax Bill: Incomplete But Still Very Harmful

Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) introduced the Senate companion to the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation today and while many pieces are missing, the framework in place spells bad news for every American energy consumer, especially low income ones.

Like Waxman-Markey, the focus is a cap and trade system, but takes the House bill’s 17 percent reduction of 2005 emissions by 2020 to a more stringent 20 percent cut. Unlike the House version, which gives away emission allowances to special interests groups that lobbied hard to protect their bottom line, the Senate draft does not include how the emission allowances – hundreds of billions of dollars - will be given away.

Co-sponsor Senator Kerry tells us, “This is not a cap-and-trade bill, it’s a pollution reduction bill.” But the simple reality is it’s an energy tax bill. As OMB director Peter Orszag says, “Under a cap-and-trade program, firms would not ultimately bear most of the costs of the allowances but instead would pass them along to their customers in the form of higher prices.” And the bill’s incompleteness goes to show how impatiently Kerry and Boxer are trying to move a historic energy tax into law.

Cap and Trade-A Federal Leviathan

Not Everyone Won the Cap and Trade Lobbying Battle

The cap and trade bill introduced by Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA) and passed in the House is 1,427 pages and includes much more than a cap and trade system to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. We’ve been detailing these economically harmful provisions in our cap and trade calamities, but Kathleen Hartnett White at the Texas Public Policy Foundation provides a tremendous synopsis of the entire bill and asks many tough questions in her policy paper, A Federal Leviathan: The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.

One particularly revealing part of the paper is the graph on the bottom of page three. Approximately 2,340 energy lobbyists worked on the cap-and-trade bill to do what President Obama said we shouldn’t – hand out allowances costs to utilities and other industries direct revenue to them. Opposition to this huge energy tax bill wheeling, dealing and arm-twisting to eke out the narrowest of majorities. They promised generous handouts for various industries and special interests but not everyone came out winners. The blue indicates the emissions by industry and the red indicates the allowances allocated by the government.

As shown by the graph, the refining and petroleum products industry, responsible for much of the carbon emissions from energy, receive the very little allowance allocations. White writes,

“Under the aggressive carbon caps, many U.S. industries could not compete with foreign products manufactured in countries without binding carbon limits. And increased import of goods manufactured elsewhere without carbon limits would
increase global carbon emissions. To address this “carbon leakage,” the bill provides for “carbon emission allowance rebates” to industries which meet specified levels of “trade intensity” or “energy intensity.” Petroleum refining, oddly, is excluded from those eligible.”

The other loser is, of course, me and you. The disguised energy tax will cost a family of four an additional $3,000 per year. When all the tax impacts have been added up, we find that the average per-family-of-four costs rise by almost $3,000 per year. In the year 2035 alone, the tax impact is $4,600. And if you add up the costs per family for the whole energy tax aggregated from 2012 to 2035, the years in which we modeled the bill, it’s about $71,500.

Giving away allowances are not an exception to the “no free lunches” adage. Giving away allowances does not lower the costs of cap and trade; it merely shifts the costs around.

Waxman-Markey is Robin Hood in reverse: it takes a lot of money from regular Americans and funnels it to Washington bureaucrats and the corporations with the best lobbyists.

Marines Doing Good Work

The hoopla and huge sighs of relief brought on by Senator John SIDNEY McCain's pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate shouldn't keep us from remembering that we still have Marines in Iraq doing good things.The 1st Marine RCT-1 is in Fallujah and turning on the power. See pics and read more here.

FALLUJAH, Iraq – Nearly 10,000 Fallujah homes were restored with electricity access thanks to Marines working closely with the Fallujah City Council to deliver 35 new generators throughout the city.

Civil Affairs Team 2, 2nd Battalion, 11th Marine Regiment, in direct support of 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, along with Sheik Hamid Ahmad Hashim al-Alwani, chairman of the FCC, announced the delivery of the 32nd generator during an Iraqi press briefing Aug. 27 at a site in the city where one of the generators has been producing power for the last three months.

“From the time we arrived in January, there was a local demand for generators throughout the city,” said Chief Warrant Officer 2 Byron Yoshida, team leader, Civil Affairs Team 2. “Initially, the project was sub-divided by precincts and eventually it became a city-wide project of providing the 35 generators.”

In early March, an informal Iraqi committee was formed and locations for the generators were proposed to Marines with Team 2. Since then, Team 2 has worked closely with contractors to deliver the units. Each generator will provide anywhere from 100 to 300 homes with electricity within a 300 meter radius. Yoshida said he anticipates having all of the generators delivered in time for the end of Ramadan celebrations, which occur Oct. 1.

While some neighborhoods receive power from privately-owned generators, the new units are available to all residents for minimal fees and are managed by trained Iraqi operators.

“We trained and certified operators who are responsible for keeping residents connected and keeping the generator operating using preventive maintenance,” Yoshida said. “The operators are obligated to ensuring the generators provide a minimum of seven hours of power on a daily basis to offset the shortage of national power.”

Sheik Hamid said he is grateful the generators arrived in time for the hotter portion of the summer and for Ramadan, but noted they are a short-term fix for a larger
problem. The city had previously used hydroelectric power produced by the
Haditha Dam, which has not been in full operation for several years due to neglect by the Saddam regime.