Guest Article - America Has Oil!

There’s Lots of Oil in America’s Energy Cupboard
by AWR Hawkins blogger

"During my graduate studies, I was frequently in the miserable position of listening to the lectures of professors who loathed this country, and who were so focused on indoctrination that they had all but forgotten that their job was to provide an education. And although the desires of these professors varied one to another – from abolishing gender to eradicating God to magnifying the “wonders” of communism and more – one theme that united all of them was a militant environmentalism that demanded an end to drilling for oil vis-à-vis their opposition to the use of fossil fuels.

The professors gave voice to their militancy whenever they saw fit, which was pretty often. And sometimes, they would ask questions designed to pull the student who was an unwitting supporter of things like cheaper gasoline into a situation where he or she would be lambasted for being so naïve as to think fossil fuels remained a viable energy option.

In the fall of 2008, in a class that covered the history of the western portion of the United States, a professor was lecturing on how oil companies had drained western states of all their oil, and how they had raped the environment in the process. Mid-sentence he suddenly stopped, grimaced, and asked: “Why do Republicans keep pushing for a revival of this kind of thing? Why don’t they understand that we’ve already taken all the oil there is to take?”

He then pushed for discussion, and when none of the students spoke up he began to call us out by name to force comment. When he called my name, I said, “Sir, this attempt to dissuade further oil extraction is analogous to trying to dissuade hungry persons from reaching into a cupboard for food.”

The professor looked at me like I’d lost my mind, but I continued: “Just imagine if you were hungry, near starvation, and you knew there was food in a cupboard in front you, but between you and the cupboard stood a strong man who not only kept you from opening the cupboard doors, but swore there wasn’t any food in the cupboard to begin with. Yet even as he made such promises you could look through the cracks in the cupboard doors and see the food he said wasn’t there.”

I then turned the question back to him and said, “In that situation what would you do?”

The professor just nodded in the negative, as if to say, “I don’t know,” so I said: “Well here’s what I think: Once the children of the house get hungry enough they will band together on the strong man, over power him, tie his hands and throw him into the basement. Then they will open the cupboard doors and eat to their hearts’ content. And in this scenario, the strong man in analogous to today’s Democrat party. They stand between us and the oil we know is beneath our feet: the oil we need to fuel our economy. Soon, I hope, conservatives will band together, throw the Democrats out of power, and begin the process of extracting oil once more.”

The professor looked directly at me and said, “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.” He then restated his firm belief that there were no significant oil resources in the western United States.

The obvious problem with the professor’s position is that he was wrong. Not only were there oil deposits in the western United States at the time he made his statements, there were profoundly large deposits. And today we know that “the formations in North Dakota and Montana hold about 20 billion barrels of recoverable crude.” How significant is an oil formation capable of producing 20 billion barrels of oil? So significant that capturing that oil would number North Dakota among “the 13 or 14 largest producing countries [in the world].”

Of course academicians aren’t the only ones denying the presence of substantive oil deposits nor are they the only ones eschewing the idea of drilling for oil when we do find it. Environmental groups, Democrat politicians, and RINOs (Republicans-in-Name-Only) have historically been equally resistant to the common sense position of pursuing energy independence by drilling here and drilling now. Members of these various factions have worked in collusion not only to keep us from drilling on a larger scale in the western United States, but in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) and on Alaska’s outer continental shelf (OCS) as well. (The amount of oil lying in Alaska’s OCS is so great that tapping into it “would make Alaska the eighth largest oil province in the world – ahead of Nigeria, Libya, Russia, and Norway.”)

The cupboard is full; of this there is no doubt. Yet we are kept from the bounty within it by a conglomeration of the persons, movements, and political parties cited above. As a result of their interference, we live at the mercy of Middle Eastern countries that produce oil for the world market. Among the many consequences of this is a transfer of wealth wherein American dollars are being siphoned away from the American people one barrel at a time while we pay other nations to produce oil which we could be producing ourselves.

Isn’t it time that those who stand between the cupboard and us were pushed out of the way? We certainly moved some of them in the November 2010 elections, yet there remain many more who still deny us access to the resources we should be using. So as the elections of 2012 draw near, we must focus on removing more of the obstructionists from office in order to clear a path to the cupboard.

Shame on those who have denied us access to the fuel we need."