Yostivanich

Some Con­gres­sional Repub­li­cans have skipped head­ing home dur­ing the August break to instead park out at Con­gress and try to pres­sure the Democ­rats to vote and debate on energy bills.

Okay, first off a cou­ple of Twit­ter mes­sages that might pro­vide some back­ground into this issue.

John Cul­ber­son, a House Repub­li­can from Texas, who uses Twit­ter has been broad­cast­ing from Con­gress regard­ing this and other issues. First off I am happy that a mem­ber of Con­gress is using social media to com­mu­ni­cate with peo­ple from across the nation on diverse issues. Sec­ond, he isn’t my rep­re­sen­ta­tive so I don’t have a say in how he votes.

Rep. Cul­ber­son tweeted this “I will be back on House floor tomor­row at 10 am with oth­ers ask­ing the Speaker to call the House back for a vote to drill here drill now”. To which I then responded “@john­cul­ber­son why does drilling here mat­ter if it really won’t add any oil in the sup­ply chain, this is just a stunt in my eye”. To his credit he answered, say­ing “@jtyost2 We can prove to you that it will make a huge diff — we will use our debate time onfloor to show the vast amount of oil in Amer­ica”. Which I then responded with “@john­cul­ber­son http://bit.ly/3SRU1M http://bit.ly/4brs2a http://bit.ly/glNHw <sar­casm> of course you can </sarcasm> I have yet to read any real info on that side”.

Per­son­ally it just feels to me like a gim­mick for Repub­li­cans to look impor­tant in this elec­tion. There isn’t a lot of oil in the US, that’s just the way it worked out. Yes, I do think we should be energy inde­pen­dent and it is a wor­thy cause for the gov­ern­ment to spend money and time towards, but this isn’t a step in that direc­tion. You are look­ing at an amount of oil that in the words of Rep. Cul­ber­son “@upadaria It takes years & epic big bucks to develop an off­shore lease — must 1^st sur­vey, be CERTAIN its good, set rig, drill many holesetc”.

So even he acknowl­edges it isn’t a short term solu­tion, noth­ing really is. I want Con­gress to focus on devel­op­ing resources that are renew­able and avail­able in the US. So what if a bill was to pass even today for off­shore drilling, it wouldn’t mat­ter for years. Drilling in ANWAR isn’t wanted by the oil com­pa­nies and won’t add any­thing to the bot­tom line for at least 10 years. The other thing is that oil com­pa­nies cur­rently aren’t using large chuncks of the oil leases that they have in place. What is the point of giv­ing a com­pany more land when they aren’t using the land they already have? That isn’t to say that the oil com­pa­nies couldn’t have rea­sons for not using their cur­rent leases, but why haven’t they gone pub­lic with that information?

Pol­i­tics is unfor­tu­nately pol­i­tics, but please can it at least develop real solu­tions to prob­lems rather than gim­micks that do noth­ing but waste my time oh and money?