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Great News! Obama to Impose New Fees on Energy Companies Who Can’t Drill Anyway
...So the federal government is not issuing any new permits to speak of. But if you have an oil lease that you’re not producing on – because you don’t have a permit – we’re going to impose new fees to pay for the EPA to investigate whether or not you should get a permit. This is an olive branch to our energy companies? Perhaps if you fashioned the branch into a club.

“Say… nice oil rig ya got there. Be a real shame if anything happened to it.”

And what precisely does it mean by saying these “reforms will also facilitate the timely review” of permit applications? It’s not very well written, but one might take from this the idea that you can either pay more or your application may remain “lost” in the stacks. At the very least some serious clarification of this is required.

This, of course, comes on top of the new $43.6 billion in taxes that the president seeks to impose on oil companies to pay for, “more money to research on solar, wind and energy-efficiency programs.”...