In 2006, when gasoline was selling for about three dollars a gallon, an outraged Senator Obama assessed our dependence on foreign oil and proclaimed, “The time for excuses is over.” Today, as gasoline approaches four dollars a gallon, now-president Obama tells us to use less. After three years of profligate spending ($100 billion) on sources of alternative energy, total solar and wind power generates a whopping 0.45% of our electricity, and we are as dependent as ever on foreign oil. Without a single green success story to tout, Mr. Obama tritely blames oil companies, OPEC, the Middle East, speculators, Republicans, and George Bush, his go-to villain.
Evidently, there is still time for excuses.
While the president gripes, we wait. We wait for the clean energy marvels discharged from his subsidized pipeline of foreordained technologies — although none are what we want or can afford. The demand for electric vehicles remains near zero, despite a $7,500 tax credit, which the president, oblivious to market signals, increased to $10,000. Another splash from the pipeline is the $50 light bulb, winner of a $10 million Energy Department prize for being, as Secretary Steven Chu said, “affordable for American families.”Mr. Obama's latest panacea is algae — although the wait time for algae-based fuels ranges from very long to infinite. Meanwhile, the impatient among us can buy hisconventional biofuels (as sold to the Navy last December) for $26.75 a gallon.
Mr. Obama proudly announced that Detroit is on track to build cars averaging nearly 55 mpg by 2025. So if we wait 13 years, and gasoline prices do not rise, we'll be able to drive almost twice as far — in frail, sluggish 2025 Obamamobiles. If we wait 50 years, perhaps technological advances in solar panels and windmills will produce similar payoffs for our utility bills.
In bold defiance of the laws of supply and demand, President Obama insists that offshore drilling and projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline will have little, if any, affect on fuel prices. Calls to increase supply are cynically mocked. Unable to explain the economics of his assertions, he artfully shifts to political derision, "'Drill-Drill-Drill' is not a plan, it's a bumper sticker. It’s not a strategy to solve our energy challenge. That’s a strategy to get politicians through an election."
In bold defiance of the laws of supply and demand, President Obama insists that offshore drilling and projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline will have little, if any, affect on fuel prices.
To be fair, every president since Richard Nixon has promised to end our dependence on foreign oil. These people did little to achieve the goal, but they had the good sense to say even less about their failure. Obama, however, aggressively tries to convince us that his energy policy — three years of bad bets on green energy and abject neglect of everything else — is working. He boasts that “under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years.”
It was none of his doing. The production increase is the result of leases issued during the Bush administration and, more significantly, exploration on state and private land. There, thanks to entrepreneurs and the technologies developed at their expense, oil and natural gas production has increased dramatically. In the lands and waters that the president controls, oil and gas production has decreased by roughly 30 to 45%. President Obama's silence regarding the success of production on state and private property, coupled with his earnest and purposeful curtailment of production on federal property, reveals his deep contempt of capitalism and fossil fuels and the wealth they create.
Nowhere is this more evident than in North Dakota, where private developers on private land have tripled oil production over the last five years. The state has had seven consecutive tax cuts. Now, given an unemployment rate of 3.5%, burger flippers make $18 an hour and thousands of $60,000 to $80,000 a year oil industry jobs wait to be filled. But instead of seeing wealth creation in North Dakota that is extensible nationally, Obama chose only to see eight dead birds that were found near the oil fields, and now seeks to stifle the growing prosperity with a lawsuit filed by the US attorney for North Dakota.
Each year, windmills from California to New York swat as many as 250,000 birds to their deaths. An estimated 70 golden eagles, as well as almost 10,000 other birds, are killed annually by the wind turbines at Altamont Pass, near Oakland, California. But no legal action has been taken. This is a political statement profoundly mocking the oil industry. President Obama is telling oil companies that he will sacrifice our very eagles (to repeat, 70 a year by the Altamont Pass bird-o-matic alone) to choke off the supply of the companies' products.
As he mocks, he squanders. He considers our 20 billion barrel reserve of recoverable oil as a fixed asset to be stingily guarded for political purposes. He seesdrilling rigs and gas stations as festering pockmarks on our national landscape, so he tells us that to reduce fuel prices we must use less. But the 20 billion barrels arepolitically recoverable oil. We possess over 1.45 trillion barrels that are technically recoverable with existing technology. We have enough oil and gas to last hundreds of years. According to a 2011 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, "the United States’ combined recoverable natural gas, oil and coal endowment is the largest on Earth . . . larger than Saudi Arabia, China and Canada, combined."
What civilization ever advanced, what economy ever prospered, by using less energy?
Use less? We should use more. What civilization ever advanced, what economy ever prospered, by using less energy? With our reserves, and such newly developed technologies as steam flooding, hydrofracking, and horizontal drilling, America could become the world's predominant supplier. Obama's mantra, "We can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices," is ignorant folly, no matter how many times repeated. That America's energy supply is too paltry to affect price is supreme fiction; that Obama promotes such a myth is supreme impudence.
US consumption is not one of the reasons energy prices are high. Considering our vast domestic reserves, prices would plummet if the US increased production to meet the country's demands. In fact, since price is a function of expected future supply and demand,it would begin to drop merely upon news of our intention to increase supply. Crude oil hit $147 a barrel and gasoline sold for $4.11 a gallon in July 2008, when President Bush announced he would lift the ban on offshore drilling. In less than a month, oil prices were below $120 a barrel. Within six months, oil was $37 a barrel, and gasoline was $1.61 a gallon.
President Obama knows this well — and he knows its converse. His restrictive energy policy reversed the 2008 trend and resulted in the doubling of prices during his term. And since speculators believe he will continue to squander fossil fuel assets, prices will continue to increase. What the president doesn't seem to know very well is the enormous national wealth lost to his feckless policies: losses in employment, personal income, tax revenue (federal, state, and local), debt reduction, retirement fund value, global competitiveness, and immunity to Middle East turmoil andnational security annoyances from the likes of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela (to name a few).
Incredibly, President Obama chooses to squander resources, inanely attempting to restructure our economy and way of life in preparation for a green fantasy worldin which pock marks are crowded out by tidy, quasi-public charging stations and biofuel dispensers supported by a vast system of government subsidized solar, wind, and algae farms. And, to help him achieve his fantasy, he doesn't think we'll mind paying $40,000 to $100,000 and more for Obamamobiles, $50 for light bulbs, $26 a gallon for algaehol, and "skyrocketing" prices for utilities.
The president's energy campaign, not that of his opponents, is a "strategy to get through an election." He believes that "Drill-Drill-Drill" is a bumper sticker, but that Wait-Mock-Squander is sound policy based on smart projections of industry and technology decades ahead. To him, a future of clean energy and green jobs sounds even better, politically, than ObamaCare. But ObamaCare now costs $1.7 trillion, only two years after Obama projected a cost of $927 billion. Still, with his failure at prognosticating exceeded only by his failure at crony-capitalism, he bets our economy on a future driven by starkly unproven technologies. He can describe the vague green future only by means of deceitful, juvenile mockery of the prosperous past. And he expects that voters will accept, on the face of his trite nostrums, the idea that our immense reserves, the largest in the world, are of little future value. One has to admire the audacity: Obama dares to risk being the president who sent us trudging patiently down the road to national weakness and economic decline, a shiny, extortionate toll road — with a multi-trillion dollar "fuel of the past" bonanza lying just beneath its pavement.
Obama might pull it off, as he did the election of 2008. If so, the pockmarks will begin to be replaced by sprawling rashes of grotesque and witless energy "arrays." Idled oil fields will become hidden relics of our environmentally despicable past, places of interest only to historians and tourists, who will find them by following the eagles seeking refuge from Obama's wind farms.
#39;s predominant supplier. Obama
