President Barack Obama is late this year with his proposal for the federal budget but made clear Mar. 15 it will contain the same raids on the oil and gas industry as its predecessors.
The assurance came in a White House fact sheet accompanying a speech that promised the same costly energy prescriptions Obama has pushed throughout his presidency.
At the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the president hailed energy research as a way to "shift our cars and trucks off oil" and called for spending on the effort of $2 billion over 10 years.
According to the fact sheet, funding would come from offshore oil and gas royalties with "additional revenues potentially generated as a result of reforms being proposed in the fiscal-year 2014 budget."
Later, the fact sheet lauds an international agenda aiming to "phase out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies." Obama's past budget proposals have used this language to support elimination of industry tax preferences such as current-year expensing of intangible drilling costs and oil-company access to generally available incentives like the foreign tax credit and manufacturer's deduction.
To this administration, tax mechanisms helpful to oil and gas are "subsidies," indistinct from, say, submarket prices for fuel in developing countries or production tax credits for wind and solar in the US. "The United States is leading efforts internationally to accelerate progress in eliminating them," the fact sheet boasts.
So when the administration proposes its budget oil and gas companies will face a tax increase. The fact sheet even resuscitates discredited financial pressure to accelerate work on federal offshore leases.
The administration refuses to accommodate its high ambitions for energy to physical and economic reality. It intends to squeeze economic energy for money and force consumption of costlier substitutes. The approach promises big spending on little energy.
Typically, Obama in Illinois preempted practicality with an applause line.
"When someone tells us we [Americans] can't," he said in Illinois, "we say, yes, we can."
Rah. Rah. Rah.
