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Oh...really........did he hatch the plan with Chavez and/or Sarkozy? Or did he do it all by himself? Did he give orders to the Columbian military?

Cite your sources....

McSame is just good natured chiding. Osama is associating the presuptive nominee with a destructive, hate-fuelling, war-mongering personality. See the difference?

McSame is just good natured chiding. Osama is associating the presuptive nominee with a destructive, hate-fuelling, war-mongering personality. See the difference?

Take what Easyoneverything says with a grain of salt. She is one of the 25% that voted for Hillary that would prefer Donald Duck or The Grinch over Obama.

For the record, domestic drilling doesn't get us a drop of oil for 10 years......that's real sound policy right there.

Drill or don't drill. I don't really care. We are already paying less for gas and oil than most of the world, even with $4 plus per gallon prices. Pulling more oil out of the earth is akin to putting a bandaid on a gaping wound that needs stitches.

It's about ensuring stability for our future.

Exactly...& you don't do that by clinging to a rapidly depleting 'precious commodity'. That is a perfect receipe for UNstability.

You do that by developing a RENEWABLE energy source. One that also puts you @ the forefront of emerging technology.

What you envision is stability to continue our consumption of cheap, petrol-based energy....sorry, not going to happen no matter how many brown kids we kill in 'terrorist' countries. In fact, every time we try to dictate the behavior of a foreign government, it greatly increases our chance of being targeted for aggressive acts of reprisal.

We do NOT have any right to any other nations natural resources, even the right to purchase that resource @ a reasonable price.....that includes oil.

It amazes me how many of the folks who decry any type of social 'entitlement' program also think that we are somehow entitled to what is the rightful property of others.

WASHINGTON - Nearly three-fourths of the 40 million acres of public land currently leased for oil and gas development in the continental United States outside Alaska isn’t producing any oil or gas, federal records show, even as the Bush administration pushes to open more environmentally sensitive public lands for oil and gas development.

An Associated Press computer analysis of Bureau of Land Management records found that 80 percent of federal lands leased for oil and gas production in Wyoming are producing no oil or gas. Neither are 83 percent of the leased acres in Montana, 77 percent in Utah, 71 percent in Colorado, 36 percent in New Mexico and 99 percent in Nevada.

How much exploration has occurred on the nearly 30 million acres of non-producing public land leases is difficult to say. BLM officials could provide no details on the number of exploratory wells drilled on those leases, despite repeated requests for that information over the past two months.


But with so much public land already available for exploration, environmental groups and local landowners are questioning why the Bush administration is pushing to lease still more federal land to the oil and gas industry, particularly in areas that the groups and some lawmakers want protected as federal wilderness areas.

$3 an acre annual rent
“The aggressive leasing of public land pushed by the Bush administration is a land grab, pure and simple, giving industry more and more control over public land while costing taxpayers millions of dollars,” said Peter Morton, a resource economist with the Wilderness Society.

Morton said the leases, which companies can lock up for 10 years with annual rents of only $2 to $3 an acre, are an economic boon to some companies because they count as assets that can make debt refinancing easier while also attracting potential investors.

The Energy Task Force headed by Vice President****Cheney asked the BLM three years ago to find ways to open new federal lands to oil and gas leasing and to speed up the approval of drilling permits. To meet increased demand for natural gas, the task force said drilling on federal land will have to double by 2020.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton agreed in settling a lawsuit with the state of Utah last year to halt all reviews of public lands in the West for new wilderness protection and to withdraw that protected status from some 3 million acres in Utah.

That decision, which conservation groups have asked a federal appeals court to overturn, cleared the way for oil and gas leasing in millions more acres of potential wilderness in Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

In Colorado last month, some of the 70 parcels BLM offered for oil and gas leasing were in an area proposed for wilderness designation in legislation introduced by Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo. Several other parcels in the proposed wilderness area were withdrawn from the lease sale at the last minute. In neighboring Utah, the BLM has sold 26 oil and gas leases since November in areas eligible for wilderness designation.

“These are incredible, beautiful and remote lands that have proven wilderness values,” DeGette said when she introduced her wilderness bill. “However, they are now open to the full force of the draconian Bush energy policy, which proposes to open up thousands of our public lands to oil and gas development.”

More land under review
Since Cheney’s task force handed down its recommendations, the BLM has completed a study of impediments to oil and gas exploration and development, speeded up approvals of drilling permits and begun expedited updates of land use plans in 21 areas, almost half of which hold out the potential for more oil and gas development.

Tom Lonnie, the BLM’s assistant director for minerals, realty and resource protection, said the government can protect environmentally sensitive areas that are leased for oil and gas exploration by including restrictions in the lease agreement.

But Lonnie said the administration has no control over when and where exploratory drilling occurs on federal leases.

“A lot of these areas where existing leases are being held onto may have low potential for production, based on industry analysis now,” he said. “The industry is out there drilling the wells and doing the exploration, not us.”

Even as more land is opened for leasing, it’s questionable whether the industry has the resources to explore it. The Cheney task force concluded that very few new onshore oil drilling rigs have been built since the mid-1980s, because of price volatility in the oil field supply and service sectors.

And the percentage of wells drilled in the United States since 2000 that are considered exploratory has declined slightly, when compared with the previous four years, according to data compiled by the Energy Information Administration.

A recent Wilderness Society study found that BLM has approved more than 25,000 drilling permits for public lands over the past decade, but the industry had drilled only about 19,000 new wells during that period.

“Even without additional leasing, if the current inventory of non-producing leases were placed into production, the scale of drilling on public lands would increase dramatically, as would the degradation of lands where drilling is wholly inappropriate,” the report concluded.

Investor magnet
For oil companies, vast holdings of federal oil and gas leases, even if undeveloped, show up in their financial records as assets that help attract investors.

“Absolutely,” said Mark Burford, director of investor relations for Tom Brown Inc., a Denver-based independent oil company. Tom Brown has more than 850,000 acres of federal land under lease, but just 22 percent is listed as producing, according to BLM records.

“In our investor presentations, we talk about the very large inventory of drilling locations on our acres that are prospective, and a lot of that would still be undeveloped,” Burford said. “But based on our knowledge of the producing areas and the formations, that acreage is very prospective and very likely to work out as far as becoming producing.”

Tom Brown is one of a half dozen large oil companies that in recent years have exceeded the federal limit on the number of leased acres they can control in any one state. BLM officials acknowledged that they have granted repeated extensions for the companies to comply with the law, instead of exercising their legal right to cancel leases of companies in violation of the law.

Those six companies — Tom Brown, Encana Oil and Gas, Anadarko, BP Amoco, Devon Energy and Marathon Oil — together controlled 3.9 million acres of federal oil and gas leases in March, according to BLM records. Just 1.2 million acres, or 30.8 percent of the total, is actually producing oil and gas.

A first-ever investigation of federal land use and energy production records by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) shows that the oil and gas industry has been given access to an immense area of western land, and that this nearly unfettered opportunity to drill in 12 western states has done nothing to reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil.

The report contradicts a widely-repeated myth, most recently articulated at an August 3 town meeting in Arkansas by Vice President****Cheney. "What we've fallen into the habit of doing is we continue to increase our consumption of energy, specifically oil and gas, but we aren't producing here at home," Cheney said. "We've taken large chunks of the country and put it off limits to any kind of exploration or development...large parts of the Rocky Mountain West are off limits" (FDCH 2004). EWG's year-long analysis shows:

* The federal government has offered 229 million acres of public and private land in 12 western states for oil and gas drilling, an area greater than the combined size of Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, according to an EWG analysis of land use records maintained by the federal government from 1982 to the present. This acreage represents the sum of total land actively leased in 1982 and land newly offered from 1982 through 2004.
* Despite access to more than 200 million acres of public land over the past 15 years (1989-2003), the oil and gas industry has produced enough energy from this land to satisfy only 53 days of U.S. oil consumption and 221 days of natural gas consumption, according to EWG's analysis of well-by-well oil and gas production records obtained August 16 2004 via a Freedom of Information Act Request. This rate of production amounts to an average of 3.6 days per year of oil and 14.8 days per year of natural gas (MMS 2004, EIA Petroleum Review 2004, EIA Natural Gas Review 2004).
* As these small production figures suggest, drilling on federal lands in the West has done nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign energy. In fact, since 1982, our dependence on foreign oil has doubled and our dependence on foreign natural gas has tripled (EIA Petroleum Review 2004, EIA Natural Gas Review 2004). A recent government estimate found that the five most oil- and gas-rich basins in the western U.S. contain about a 280-day supply of oil and an 8-year supply of natural gas at current rates of consumption -- an analysis that likely overstates the amount of energy that is economically available (Energy Inventory 2003).
* Despite the relatively small amounts of energy in the West, the Bush administration has removed barriers to drilling on a net 45 million acres in 12 western states and has lifted environmental protections and emphasized drilling on lands already open to oil and gas development.
* In producing oil and gas, companies often pump out large quantities of water from underground, particularly in coal bed methane development. In the last 15 years, companies have pumped out 548 billion gallons of water, enough to pour over Niagra Falls for 42 days at the Falls' current flow rate. About 66 percent of that water was reinjected, still leaving 181 billion gallons extracted -- the amount of water that pours over Niagra Falls for 13 days (MMS 2004, CNN 2003). Most so-called "produced water" is unfit for human consumption but removing it can deplete local springs and wells; contaminate land, surface water and ground water; and cause erosion. Reinjection can contaminate groundwater (OGAP 2004).
* Between 2000 and 2004, the oil and gas industry poured more than $75 million into political campaigns, with 79 percent going to Republicans, money that may have influenced administration decisions opening protected public lands to drilling (CRP 2004).

Oil, Gas, Political Cash

Campaign contributions can have a significant influence on the policies that elected officials choose to support. A critical look at these contributions can provide an understanding of the motivation behind the promotion of policies that have favored oil and gas industry interests over the public interest.

The oil and gas industry has kept the wheels of power greased with nearly $75.5 million of federal campaign contributions during the past three election cycles, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). Of the 50 industries giving the most in federal contributions, oil and gas interests ranked number 10 in 2000, 14 in 2002 and 21 in 2004.

EWG's analysis of campaign data compiled by CRP also shows that companies holding leases on large amounts of western lands are some of the biggest contributors in the industry, and that the contributions overwhelmingly go to Republicans:

* Nineteen of the top 20 oil and gas lease holders in the U.S. contributed $17.9 million to political campaigns from 2000 to 2004, 24 percent of the total contributions from the industry during that period (Table 4).
* Nearly 60 percent of the top political oil and gas contributors (those donating more than $200,000) hold leases on western public land (Table 5).
* Companies holding current leases on public lands gave at least 58% of the total political contributions from the oil and gas industry between 2000 and 2004, and gave 4.7 times more money to the GOP than to Democrats. Two-thirds (66.5%) of contributing lessees gave exclusively to the GOP.

This should have been performed already, however, the gas/oil companies I"m sure lobbied against this as well as ensured this did not happen by placing politicians in their pockets.

Citing Need for Assessments, U.S. Freezes Solar Energy Projects
Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun, via Reuters

By DAN FROSCH
Published: June 27, 2008

DENVER — Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.

The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

They have the land....but they're not drilling on it...

Which leads me to believe that it's more profitable for them to
NOT drill...

Yet McCain wants to give them more (offshore) leases....

We do not have enough volume in domestic oil (& much of it
is in forms that are hard to get at) to run our won country even
if we could get it all right now.

I'm speaking of the ACTUAL children of Iraq. Not foreign
soldiers. If you have stats on US white children that have died in
the war, please post them.

All the terrorists attacks on US soldiers/land in recent
years come from one source.....our longstanding habit of trying to
dictate how others do 'business' w/ their own resources.
Rationalize it all you want by saying it will be good for them....
it's still not your right to decide what is good for other nations
& then enforce that by military means.

Saudi Arabia is where the real terrorists are from....
created by the US-backed despotic, extremist government there
w/ an atrocious human rights record.

Within socialist countries, the wealth is distributed more times to none equally as compared to a capitalistic system where we have poverty stricken citizens who can not afford the huge gas prices, therefore, the prices in europe can not be compared to US prices due to the fact, within Europe they are paid better as compared to some of our communities which only receive minimum wage.

Yes, we are paying less than the people in Europe, but you could probably fit Europe inside of the state of Texas or Alaska. There is no comparison. Living in the Houston area with a terrible transit system one must own a good car to survive.

This 4.00 per gallon is killing me.

Brown kids? Last time I checked, there are many different colors of kids in the war, white, brown, black. Everyone is someone's kids, therefore, not just "brown kids" are dying.

You have a point, however, Europeans STILL can't afford gasoline and most of them drive teeny cars, or don't drive at all using bicycles, and where available mass transportation.