California Conservative

Last night, readers on Drudge read that President Obama was willing to consider drilling on the OCS:

Reversing a ban on oil drilling off most U.S. shores, President Barack Obama on Wednesday announced an expansive new policy that could put oil and natural gas platforms in waters along the southern Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and part of Alaska.

When I read that, I was highly skeptical, mostly because I knew one of the things that Congress is thinking about debating next is Cap and Trade. This afternoon, FNC’s Jim Angle reported that he’d had conversations on background with Democratic staffers who admitted that this is all about capturing Republican votes for Cap and Trade.

That information is verified later in the AP article:

Obama made no secret of the fact that one factor in his decision was securing Republican support for a sweeping climate change bill that has languished in Congress. But Obama has long stated his support in favor of the “tough decision” to expand offshore drilling.

Let’s remember that then-Candidate Obama told people that energy prices “would necessarily skyrocket” under his Cap and Trade proposal. Let’s remember what he said days before Election Day:

What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.

I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

There was no way that I was going to take President Obama at his word on energy exploration, especially after he said that inflating the tires on our cars would save millions of barrels of oil a year: (more…)