The Silent Republicans

America now has the most natural gas of any country in the world. Reports vary but the general consensus seems to be somewhere around a hundred years supply. We are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. Natural gas that sells for around $3 in America sells for $16 in Japan. So why don’t we sell our natural gas to Japan and use the huge tax revenues to address some of our debt problems? The answer in two words – Barack Obama.

Before we can sell natural gas to anyone outside our borders we must first be able to ship it at a reasonable cost. The catch is we don’t have a single operational natural gas export terminal. Why don’t we have any natural gas export terminals? The answer in two words – Barack Obama.

No natural gas export terminals can be built without a federal license and Obama will not sign any of the dozen or so license requests that have been languishing on his desk for many months. Why he refuses to sign these tax generating licenses is anyone’s guess. Currently, the only company that has a license to export natural gas is Chenier Energy (stock symbol LNG). They have the only natural gas import facility in America and are in the process of converting it to an export facility. This lone natural gas export facility is expected to be ready for use by 2015.

For Obama to sit on these license requests is a disgrace second only that of the silent republicans who have said (and still say) nothing about it. Instead of screaming at Obama and decrying his inaction in the face of the country’s debt problems, they sit in silence. The stupidity of their might explain why they lost the last election. Issuing the export licenses costs nothing and has the potential to see billions of dollars of tax revenue enter the government’s coffers.

Someone should be carrying this message to the America people and it should be the Republicans. Why isn’t it?