Obama's war against energy production

Houston Chronicle:

Energy-state lawmakers vowed Friday to block President Barack Obama’s proposed $31.5  billion tax increase on oil and gas producers.

Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget blueprint released Thursday targeted U.S. energy producers by imposing new taxes and fees, abolishing existing tax breaks and changing accounting rules.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, called the proposals “punitive provisions” that would raise revenues for the government but hurt the country’s energy security.

Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston, said Obama’s plans threaten the commercial viability of new domestic production and would price developers out of the market and force companies overseas.

“It would be devastating for the cost of energy and for the producing states,” Green added.

Producers of traditional fossil fuels could face a hit of up to $100 billion if Congress heeds the president’s request to abolish what he called of “oil and gas company preferences” in the tax code and adopts his cap-and-trade emissions program.

The energy industry would shoulder most of the cost of a cap-and-trade plan that would raise an estimated $79 billion in 2012 with new limits on pollutants blamed for climate change.

Some of the money raised by higher taxes on traditional energy producers would be used to underwrite development and deployment of clean energy technologies, including solar, biomass, geothermal and wind.

...

The net effect of the proposals, said Mark Kibbe, director of federal relations for the American Petroleum Institute, is to “make U.S. projects less competitive with foreign projects.”

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Some industry leaders, including ConocoPhillips, BP America, and Shell Oil Co., have backed a broad cap-and-trade plan; others, such as Exxon Mobil Corp., have favored a more direct tax on carbon emissions.

Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal will be resisted by Republicans on Capitol Hill who say its costs would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher costs for energy and consumer products.

Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, said a cap-and-trade program carries too much risk, especially during a recession.

The initiative, he said, is “open to political manipulation and hidden taxes and real job harm.”

This is the Democrat energy hatred on display. The collateral damage will be enormous in the loss of jobs and the greater dependency on foreign energy, not to mention the loss of revenues from royalties from greater domestic production. Those royalties would be in excess of 10 times what these taxes will produce not to mention the lower prices for energy as opposed to the high price drag on the economy caused by the Obama Democrat plan. The Democrat plan will reduce jobs at a time when increased production would increase well paying jobs.