68 million acres of non-producing oil leases

Nick Snow in the Oil and Gas Journal says that "the independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States charged on 28 August that government red tape and environmentalist hindrances are the primary causes of lease development delays, and it urged Democrats to cease the inflammatory and erroneous claim that US producers are just 'sitting on' 68 million acres of leased land as the fall campaigns get under way." The article is entitled "IPAMS to Democrats: Quit promoting dishonest energy claims."

IPAMS Executive Director Marc Smith says House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Polosi (CA) and Chief Deputy Whip Diana DeGette (CO) made this false claim at the Democrat national convention in Denver.

Smith said that 100% of the Bureau of Land Management oil and gas leases in the Mountain States region have been protested by environmental groups. He says "Industry is in a classic Catch-22 situation whereby the government has created a cumbersome process that takes years to complete, environmental groups exploit the process to throw up legal roadblocks at every stage, and then Congress and the environment lobby turn around and blame the industry for not 'diligently drilling.'"

When Obama calls for producing more natural gas and reluctantly allows a wee bit of drilling, it may mean nothing, since he may simply be counting on the bureaucracy and environmental groups to keep any additional oil and gas from being supplied. Until the politicians do something to speed up the process of bringing new finds to production, the granting of a few leases may mean nothing. We must remember that the Democrats have nearly uniformly decided that any use of carbon-based fuels is bad because they result in CO2 emissions. Consequently, they want carbon-based fuel costs to go up, which delays in production accomplishes by delaying production and raising the costs of production.

Thanks to Lemuel Linder for pointing this article out to me.