U.S. Has Royalty Plan

Or perhaps an influx of cheap oil will drop the price of a barrel of oil and benifit everyone.

 

This shortfall can easily be made up by gutting the DOE renewable energy research budget. They can also raise revenue by cutting the PTC.

 

The ironic thing about this is that when you read the summary of the article that Godiva posted, you would assume that it's the Bush administration that is giving the oil companies all this royalty free oil.

Then when you read the article, you find out that it's actually the Clinton admisistration and the Congress of that era that did it. A decade or so ago the Clinton administration and Congress told oil companies that if they invested in infrastructure to extract oil from these hard to get to places, they would be able to pump the oil royalty free. A lot of laws and contracts were created to support that. So now, almost a decade later, the oil companies have finally finished buiding the infrastructure and are almost ready to start pumping that oil. The current US government is bound by the laws and contract created by the Clinton government and so the oil companies get the oil royalty free, just as Clinton promised them.

How ironic.

 

The royalty relief was intended for when the oil price is low. From the article.

 

I don't see anything in the summary that says it's the Bush administration's baby.

As far as Clinton goes, he was liberal on social issues, but practically a dyed-in-the-wool neocon on big business issues (NAFTA, DMCA, etc.) which is why I always found the right's hatred of him bizarre. If they hated Clinton, what would they think of a real liberal?

 

Oh, it was just the way things were worded that implied that the was the result of new action by the Bush administration rather than contractual obligation from the Clinton Administration.

Phrases like "the government will let" and "the government will give up" and "even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50" imply that the current goverment is choosing to do this.

In reality much of it is the result of Clinton's waving of the price triggers for contracts signed in 1998 and 1999.

But then again, it was a New York Times article that it was clipped from, so I would expect no less.

 

The question now is, will Repugnicans correct this error, or will they whine about it and do nothing?