Sorry about your jobs, it's just business

Get your cheap oil right here.  Midwest refineries booming.  East Coast, not so much.

Whoever thought that freeing ourselves from foreign oil -- if you don't count Canada -- would be a bad thing? Turns out, it is.
I went to Rep. Pat Meehan's big hearing on the closing of the Delaware River refineries this morning and while the testimony of the four witnesses, two oil industry spokesmen and two government analysts, was anything but clear, here's my take-away:

• The country is awash in oil, particularly from Canada and North Dakota. The problem is, there is no way to get it from there to here, other than a few rail cars.  No ports up there, you know, although the Great Lakes are not that far away.
• Prices are sky high again (though still only half the $8 a gallon Europeans are paying) because supply is way up and demand is down.  This is, of course, the complete opposite of how the law of supply and demand works in the real world, as U.S. Rep. John Carney (D-Del.) tried in vain to point out at the hearing, but never mind.
• We need the Keystone XL pipeline so we can get the oil down to Texas refineries where we can refine it and/or sell it abroad.  This will not help the 36,000 people who are going to lose jobs, homes and businesses here in Delaware County one tiny bit, but it will sure as hell help the global oil industry, which in turn will help our economy, etc., etc., and so forth..
• The problem with the Delaware River refineries (and the Hovensa refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands) is that they've been refining very, very expensive sweet crude oil shipped in from Europe and Africa.
• Whoopee, we don't have to do that any more because we have all that oil flowing south down the middle of the country.  
• There is a role for maybe one of our three Delaware River refineries to play in the future, as terminals to receive the refined oil from the Midwest to distribute here, just as Sunoco's newly reopened Eagle Point refinery terminal, will do.  
• Obama is to blame. That goes without saying.  Well so are all our presidents going back to Nixon, who created the EPA, and those senators and congressmen who enacted the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water act and forced the auto industry to develop high-mileage cars and those cornbelt pols who subsidized ethanol and the tree-huggers who made Detroit invent reinvent electric cars.
• The Republicans are to blame too, with all that "drill, baby, drill" stuff, or, as it turns out, "frack, baby, frack."  We have been freed from foreign oil as we now get less than 50 percent of our energy needs from elsewhere.
• The oil industry is a "resilient" industry, a "flexible" industry, a "highly competitive" industry, but apparently our local refineries were not resilient enough or flexible enough to expand, repair their infrastructure and save themselves from destruction.   
• But don't worry, the oil industry will make sure we get gasoline, diesel and home heating oil here on the East Coast, even if it ends up being refined in India and we have to pay far for it than those lucky Midwesterners.  
• Our U.S. environmental laws are too darn strict and after all, the industry has already cleaned up it's act (thanks to those laws), and India doesn't have the same standards and .... and ....

Well you get the idea.  If you don't, here are the statements of three of the speakers at this morning's hearing.   Howard Gruenspecht, U.S. Department of Energy, Charles T. Drevna, Charles T. Drevna, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and Robert Greco, Downstream and Industry Operations
American Petroleum Institute.  Read them for yourselves.
The fourth speaker, Brandon Wales of the Department of Homeland Security didn't post his remarks but I can tell you, nobody at the hearing seemed much worried about terrorists disrupting our oil pipelines, except Pat Meehan.