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Tim Schowalter: Muftic’s Column Misleading on Obama Energy Record

Felicia Mufti’s June 15 column was misleading about President Obama’s energy record.

She states, “He has already opened up more federal leases…” The exact opposite is true. Since Obama has been in office, the number of federal, onshore leases put up for bid has dropped by 75 percent. To make things worse he has extended the review process to one year for leases nominated for bid.

The BLM staggers when leases in different areas can be nominated for bid, so in some areas the review process could take 1.5 years. This is not opening up more federal lands for leasing.



Muftic also says that Obama’s shut down of drilling in the Gulf had had limited effect. Another totally misleading statement, as many shut down rigs in the Gulf are still waiting to resume drilling. Obama installed a slow and cumbersome new permitting process and it has been very slow in issuing new permits.

Obama recently stated that he is proud that he has issued 10 new permits, an outright lie. Only one of the permits was a new permit and the other nine were permits to continue drilling on wells that had been shut down by his moratorium. In the same radio comment he said his administration had permitted as many Gulf wells as the previous administration, another outright lie.



Obama and the Democrats have this defeatist attitude about drilling, that we are not sure how much oil we will find so it’s not worth looking for. We have oil potential from Alaska to Florida and from California to the East Coast that is just waiting to be explored. Every barrel of oil found will create American jobs, pay American taxes, reduce our dependence on foreign oil and even possibly reduce the price at the pump.

We can help our selves if Obama will let us. So in summary Obama has tried to shut down and bad-mouthed an American industry at every opportunity, and has personally destroyed American jobs, taxes and our balance of payments.

Tim T. Schowalter

Granby


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