Obama: Big Oil Savior

Huh?!

You read the title right.

If you’ve been following along, not much would surprise you more than to find out that President Obama came to the rescue of “Big Oil.”  Heck, it would be surprising to find out that just about any national Democrat came to the rescue of Big Oil.  The DNC just released an attack ad portraying Republican nominee Mitt Romney as a friend of Big Oil, as if that friendship should disqualify Romney from being President.

So surely Obama would not be guilty of friendship with Big Oil, would he?

Not publicly, no.  But what if he had to choose between befriending Big Oil and the job losses, higher gas prices, and overall political anchor that would have resulted from the closure of the largest oil refinery on the east coast? When push comes to shove, the fact is that Obama, the federal government, and we the people need the jobs, the energy, and the economic benefits of so-called Big Oil.

Our President, the champion of “green energy” and archenemy of “dirty energy” and Big Oil, recently found himself betwixt precisely that rock and that hard place.  If Sunoco’s Philadelphia refinery closed this month- as was scheduled unless they found a buyer- Obama would have seen 850 lost jobs and higher gas prices in an election year, and he would have had a much tougher row to hoe in convincing us that he is a better man for his job than Governor Romney.

Obama already demonstrated his need for the Oil & Gas industry- at least during an election year- when he flip-flopped on the Keystone XL pipeline.  Obama rejected the pipeline, then amid pressure from terrible jobs and unemployment numbers and soaring gas prices he went to pipeline hub Cushing, OK to announce the pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico would be expedited.

Now, anti-oil Obama helped broker a deal to save the Philadelphia refinery, and the EPA even agreed to “relax emission limits” as the Carlyle Group tries to return the refinery to profitability.  This is very significant, since Obama’s sharpest weapon against Big Oil has been the EPA regulations and fines.  Here the White House indirectly admits that the EPA is a substantial obstacle to running a profitable refinery.

At least in an election year, Obama sees that this country needs Big Oil, their jobs, their ability to provide gasoline and other products at low prices, as well as the fact that the EPA is a huge obstacle in their ability to do so.

Apparently, Big Oil has a savior in the White House- at least when he knows he can’t win an election witout them.

(The Carlyle Group’s David Marchick thanked the White House first in a list of people and organizations that made the deal possible, quoted in this Downstream Today article; which piqued my interest to find out how and why the anti-oil White House would help save an oil refinery)

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