Bakken Oil Play Puts American Oil Hypocrisy Front & Center

The Bakken Play in the Williston Basin is an area which advances in extraction technology and horizontal drilling has just been assessed at 4.3 billion bbls. of proven recoverable reserves, the largest recent play in the continental USA.

This new find & assessment will once again highlight the fact that American political efforts to restrict development of fields offshore & in ANWR is frankly frivolous & stupid. There is a Luddite agenda out there among the ultra-left Democrats & their anti-industrial & anti-internal combustion engine tree huggers.

Also, the NIMBY syndrome for refining operations has prevented new refining capacity & thereby increased the likelihood of bottlenecks & breakdowns in processing crude.

Finally, obsessive regulation by Congress hikes prices by imposing mandates on processing procedures and redundant safety precautions. Spurred by environmental busybodies, the proliferation of various grades of refined product mandated by state & other official agencies is pricing oil to a level that causes a massive economic impact.

The enemies of "big oil" are hurting the economy & stifling US industrial capacity and economic development.

I believe the ultimate target is the family car and the mobility of the nuclear American family in general---the politicians on the left believe they can turn an immense continental economy into a Euro-style mass transit economy based on rail & public transportation. The only previous continental economy where this has been attempted was the USSR. With disastrous consequences.

The entire "greening" project in its various Luddite manifestations is a recipe for economic disaster.