If our nation has to rely on oil shale as our last source of oil, we're in deep trouble.
If I'm the President of the United States in a few months here, I will set a national
goal of America and North America, North American energy independence by 2020.
North American energy independence by 2020.
That means we produce all the energy we use in North America.
And there are a number of things I'm going to do to make that happen.
Number one, on federal lands, on federal lands, the permitting process to actually drill and
get oil or gas is extraordinarily slow.
Now interestingly, on state lands and private lands, state regulators have streamlined their
permitting process, their evaluation, environmental process, safety processes.
They found a way, because we compete states do with one another, they found a way to do
a job in a more efficient way.
So for instance, in North Dakota, it takes 10 days to get a permit for a new well.
In Colorado, it takes 27 days.
That's to get on state land, a permit, or private land.
But do you know how long it takes the federal government regulators to get your permit on
federal land on average 307 days?
So here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to have the states take responsibility for the permitting process on federal lands.
I'm not a big strong believer in oil shale.
I guess I hope that we find an energy source other than oil, before we have to really get
into developing oil shale, is very expensive, very disruptive to the environment, and takes
an awful lot of water for each barrel of oil that is to be recovered.
Put together a five-year leasing plan to lease offshore sources, and we're going to make
as part of that the Carolinas and Virginia and the Gulf.
We're going to have targets, we're going to have the companies that do the drilling
responsible for hitting those targets, and if not, we're going to have corrective measures,
but we're finally going to also make sure that we implement state-of-the-art safety
procedures for offshore drilling, and assure that as we put in place these regulations
and procedures, they're designed for safety, they're not designed to stop drilling for
energy resources.
Using the law to stop production of energy is not in the best interest of the United
States of America and our people.
Okay, we'll let it sit for a second and rise to the top.
We went to a pre-hearing yesterday in Lansing, and Bridge is proposing to run additional pipeline
through at least three counties currently.
It's understood that the pipelines that they're going to be building will be running tar sands.
I don't think the communities are aware of what is going to be occurring.
They don't realize the severity of it, and just how detrimental it can be.
The only ones who are going to benefit are the pipeline companies.
They talk about jobs and job growth.
The only job growth that I have seen for this pipeline are the workers that are here cleaning
up this bill.
Number four, it's about time we get an accurate inventory about how much energy we have.
The president keeps on talking about the idea that we only have two percent of the world's
oil reserves.
That's a dramatic understatement of the energy resources of this country.
It's probably at least seven times that amount or even more.
So I'm going to authorize a new seismic study of our onshore and offshore resources to find
out what we have and where we have it.
I'm also going to require those that have these kind of seismic surveys and private
hands to collect them so that we can look at them, share them with one another.
We're going to take advantage of an understanding of where our resources are so we can plan
accordingly.
The United States of America has an enormous need for a long-term dependable source of
energy.
One solution is right here in our own backyard, the mining and development of oil shale.
Seventy-three percent of the world's recoverable oil shale is located in the United States,
in comparison to only five percent of the world's recoverable oil.
Over one-and-a-half trillion barrels of that oil is estimated to be in the Green River
formation, located in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming.
Utah's deposits of oil shale and tar sands are attracting attention, again.
For more than 100 years, industry has been trying to get fuel out of oil shale without
commercial success.
That's because turning rock into fuel is difficult.
Vast quantities of oil shale rock would need to be mined, then heated to high temperatures
to extract a substance called kerogen, which could then be refined into a liquid fuel.
Utah tar sands are such a low-grade energy source that it's been used as a road base
for decades.
When oil prices start to climb, however, talk of developing oil shale and tar sands inevitably
gets louder.
But any potential commercial development of tar sands and oil shale would require vast
amounts of water and produce large amounts of pollution, a steep price for Utahns to
pay.
Utah has a choice to make.
It could use its precious and limited water supplies for oil shale and tar sands development,
or it could save those precious supplies to assure that there would be water for future
population growth, for irrigated agriculture, for recreation, and for the future.
I'm also going to do something which has been around for a long time, and that is I'm
going to change the regulatory and permitting process to make it more transparent and make
sure that as we put in place regulations, they're designed to actually help get production
where it's needed and not using regulation to stop the production of energy.
And a very serious warning about what is happening to our oceans right now.
Scientists warn time is running out to stop entire ecosystems from becoming extinct.
It's part of a new study that says climate change and overfishing could make marine species
like coral reefs extinct in just one generation.
Rhys Holter is a conservation biologist at Cal Lutheran University and author of the
Insatiable Bark Beetle.
Good to see you.
Good morning.
Good morning, Chris.
You know, one of the scientists said these findings are shocking.
That was the word that he used.
How serious do you think this is?
What's at stake here?
Well, Chris, I hear the earth calling SOS.
This is epic and there's death everywhere.
There's ocean acidification.
We're missing 40% of the phytoplankton, the base of the ocean, that absorbs carbon dioxide.
We've got massive fertilizer and sewage runoff, creating 400 dead zones that are growing on
the oceans.
And we've got 46,000 pieces of plastic for every square mile of the oceans.
Hello.
I think we've got a major problem here.
First of all, we're polluting.
We put a combination of sewage and toxins into the world's rivers and streams and lakes
every year equal to the weight of the full 7 billion of us on the planet.
We are also extracting and extracting water.
We are displacing water and displacing our rivers.
We're extracting our rivers to death in order to irrigate for the global food trade.
You need to know that 70% of all water that we use is used in food production.
So as our population is growing and the sophistication of the type of food people are demanding
and the global movement of food and commodities is actually the movement and displacement
of water.
