Remember last March, when President Obama went on a tour of Latin America and bascially told Brazil that they should go ahead and drill, baby, drill so that the United States could become one of their best customers?
Unfortunately, it turns out that, unlike most things President Obama says, this was not just a bunch of half-baked political blather. The Hill reports:
A top Energy Department official will travel to Brazil next week to launch a high-level partnership aimed at developing the South American country’s oil-and-gas resources. ...
Obama announced his intentions to launch the partnership in May while visiting Brazil. He said at the time that he hopes to invest in Brazil’s oil-and-gas resources because the country is more stable than the Middle East and has vast fossil fuel reserves. ...
The White House said Friday that DOE Deputy Secretary Daniel Poneman will unveil the “U.S.-Brazil Strategic Energy Dialogue” in Brasília, Brazil, on Aug. 17. A number of Obama administration officials will join Poneman on the trip, including officials from the State Department, Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency. ...
The White House said Friday the energy dialogue “will address our mutual interest in the development of safe, secure and affordable energy in an environmentally sound way, including oil, natural gas, biofuels, clean energy, and civilian nuclear energy.”
Let me be clear. I have zero problems with a free trade-based world in which different countries' free market economies freely interact and freely choose to purchase resources from one another. I do have a problem with an administration that, through a methodology of bureaucratic hogwash, practically shuts down our own country's domestic oil industry, limits our freedom to choose whether we want to produce our own oil or purchase it overseas, and sends money and jobs out of the country in the process.