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Friday, September 5, 2008
Marshall: Drill, but first strike a better bargain with oil companies
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall of Macon has teamed up with a Republican, Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, to pen an op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post that includes these paragraphs:
The controversial bans on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have preserved precious oil and natural gas reserves owned by the public. Thank environmentalists for this unintended gift.
But for these bans, we would have wasted the reserves without a strategic plan. Leasing and drilling would have lowered world oil prices by a few cents, benefiting more foreign consumers than Americans….
We hope this price crisis prompts the adoption of a strategic plan to use the remaining value of our federally owned oil and natural gas reserves to fund a clean, affordable and independent energy future for America, a goal worthy of short-term environmental concessions and risks.
Virtually all general drilling bans should be lifted. We should permit drilling offshore and in the ANWR and require that it be done with appropriate care.
Before granting additional drilling rights, however, we should fundamentally change the terms of future oil and gas lease agreements to ensure that taxpayers capture more of the revenue from our remaining reserves.
Today’s agreements provide exceptional profits for leaseholders when prices rise, so much so that leaseholders have a significant financial incentive to delay production until prices rise. That must change….
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The cost of criticism
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My AJC colleague Ben Smith just called from WAGA headquarters, where he’d been nosing into ad buys for the fall campaigns. Still no sign of Jim Martin, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate.
Anyway, Smith was able to put a price on that single, 30-second ad that state Rep. Rob Teilhet (D-Smyrna) has purchased to chide state School Superintendent Kathy Cox in the middle of her appearance tonight on Fox’s “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”
Click here for the original post with a Youtube version of the ad.
Meeting Jeff Foxworthy: Priceless. The cost of a video raspberry: $2,550. No doubt they come cheaper when purchased in bulk.
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