In a post last night, we linked to an excellent article by Steve Forbes on the Obama Administration’s Carteresque energy policies.  Today, Daniel Kish has a piece at Human Events in which he further illustrates how insane Obama’s energy polcies are, particularly with regard to his inexplicable decision to lock up the huge domestic oil reserves in Alaska:

The revolt in Libya has raised serious questions about Libya’s ability to export about 1.4 million barrels of oil per day to the world.  Meanwhile, the largest pipeline in America—the trans-Alaska pipeline system or TAPS—is currently using less than one-third of its original capacity, meaning that if our government would allow it, Alaska could send 1.4 million barrels more per day to consumers in the U.S.  Alaska is hugely rich in energy resources, but unfortunately the government owns most of the land and all of the offshore waters, and it won’t permit development of new resources.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, could produce 1 million barrels a day by itself.  At today’s $100 per barrel, ANWR’s 10.4 billion barrels of oil are worth over $1 trillion to the U.S. economy.  The imports we need to replace the oil the government won’t let us put into TAPS means Americans spend more thana $51 billion per year on foreign oil—and on foreign workers—instead of being able to buy American oil and employ American workers with that $51 billion.

But ANWR is not the only place we could acquire oil in Alaska.  The Obama administration is holding up a permit for the first oil to be produced from the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska—an Indiana-sized area set aside to produce oil.  If Americans can’t produce oil from a petroleum reserve, where can we produce it?

Where indeed? This is a question Governor Palin has been asking for years, and one which the voters will surely be asking in 2012.  I was certainly asking it yesterday when it cost me $73 to fill my gas tank. Read the the rest of Kish’s piece here.

(h/t wodiej)