President Obama’s release of 30 million barrels of oil from the 727-million-barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve is reckless, irresponsible and possibly illegal. Where’s the emergency?
Libya? Oh come on.
The action sets a dangerous precedent. It tells presidents they can drain the reserve not to steady the nation after the shock of a huge natural disaster or war, but to give short-term comfort to short-sighted voters.
58-day reserve. To start with, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has only enough oil to replace America's 12 million barrels of daily imports for 58 days. That’s it, less than two months’ supply.
That’s so little it’s dangerous to remove anything from the reserve until and unless there’s no alternative.
And there are alternatives. We can buy the oil that’s on the market. It isn’t cheap, but it hasn’t dried up. We also can start drilling for more of our own oil and let the markets react.
Democratic model. But you can be sure that after we deplete 4.1 percent of our reserve and weaken our leverage as a result, world oil will be even more expensive next year.
Unfortunately, this is the usual from Democrats in power: Drain everything we’ve saved for rainy days, squander it on sunny days, take credit for the flush days in the sun, then point at Republicans as the big storm approaches and we’re helpless.
If the Social Security Trust Fund is their model, once the Democrats have siphoned every drop from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, they’ll tell us, no, it’s not empty; we left notes promising to re-fill it.
Then ask a refinery how much gasoline those notes are good for.
Frank Warner
I too am puzzled why the release now .. there have been plenty of occasions in the past that seemed more appropriate and he refused.
Besides, you're supposed to threaten a release to scare off speculators.
Posted by: Neo | June 26, 2011 at 11:02 PM
I'm still enjoying free oil from our Iraq conquest. tic
Posted by: CJW | June 27, 2011 at 10:39 AM