Obama to spend $1 billion to fund offshore drilling - for Brazil

By Rick Moran

Just when you think Obama has made the dumbest move of his presidency, he proves once again that there is no limit to his stupidity.

The Wall Street Journal is incredulous:

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.

But look on the bright side. If President Obama has embraced offshore drilling in Brazil, why not in the old U.S.A.? The land of the sorta free and the home of the heavily indebted has enormous offshore oil deposits, and last year ahead of the November elections, with gasoline at $4 a gallon, Congress let a ban on offshore drilling expire.

Obama is actually going to go ahead with additional oil leases for the Gulf of Mexico. But as the Journal points out, there is as much oil along our east and west coasts as the oil field in Brazil our president is financing.

But carbon is evil and we emit too much of it. Better to let Americans pay through the nose for foreign oil than exploit any of our own fields and have one additional molecule of CO2 waft up into the atmosphere.

To quote the great philosopher Bugs Bunny: "What a Maroon."