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These are the Chris Horner’s last three posts:

June 04, 2010
Planet Gore
The hot blog.
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/200232/bp-spill-shows-we-need-pass-bps-bill/chris-horner

BP Spill Shows We Need to Pass BP’s Bill?
June 04, 2010 11:30 AM
By Chris Horner

For those of you who watched Hannity on Fox News last night and wondered why an “eco-entrepreneur” was allowed to discuss President Obama’s claim that the Gulf spill shows that we need his cap-n-trade scheme with no other guest it was because a storm here in Charlottesville left me all made up pretty and sitting in a chair with the satellite connections fried out.

So, here is essentially the rejoinder that you would have heard:

Obama’s argument goes that, with BP having been reckless and the administration incompetent, we need a massive new tax increase on all of us to make energy more expensive. This makes sense only in the land of Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste.

How do you know there’s no good reason for any particular agenda? When the reasons or excuses offered for pursuing that agenda keep changing.So it is that a global-warming tax became a climate-change tax, then somehow a job-creation energy tax, and then a national-energy-security tax, and now is an energy tax to show how engaged and angry President Obama is at BP’s oil spill.

But in his Pittsburgh remarks announcing this new logic, the president failed to note the disconnect in lashing out at BP by . . . passing a light-switch tax that John Kerry admits BP helped to write, and is the most aggressive lobbyist for. Yeah, take that BP!

Instead, he said “The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century.” No. That would be too good for them. Instead, he seeks to hold them hostage to his beloved windmills, which are technology of, at best, the century before that. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dcnow/2010/06/obama-cites-gulf-oil-spill-and-promises-fight-for-climate-bill.html

If decades of eight-dollar gas and wasteful windmill schemes were all that were necessary to inspire the invention of pixie dust and flying cars and our final victory over those stubborn laws of physics, wouldn’t those things already have been achieved in Europe, considering how long they’ve been entertaining such energy-policy nonsense? Instead, all they have achieved is chronic double-digit unemployment, the flight of manufacturing jobs (including steel jobs to Carroll Country, KY), and now bankrupt nations, as even the Spanish socialist government has admitted. http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/55913/emulate-spains-green-economy-no-thanks-mr-president/chris-horner

But none of this takes away from the disconnect between one company’s negligence and one administration’s incompetence meaning we get stuck with a huge energy tax, killing jobs and harming seniors and the poor while driving us closer to Europe’s disastrous model. The truth of course is that this is just a cynical Power Grab using whatever excuse they can find to repeat Europe’s economic disaster here as part of their fundamental transformation of America.

Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America Christopher C. Horner (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1596985992/ref=nosim/nationalreviewon

PERMALINK 06/04/10 11:30 AM

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June 02, 2010
Planet Gore
The hot blog.
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/56270/spreading-del-wealth-del-energy-poverty/chris-horner

Spreading the Wealth Energy Poverty
June 02, 2010 10:40 AM By Chris Horner

Alaska governor Sean Parnell writes in an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal about the Obama administration’s broader agenda to stifle production of domestic energy resources, while insincerely wringing its hands (my take, not his) about “energy independence”: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704596504575272991022477222.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

“As I noted in these pages last year, responsible offshore oil and gas production, particularly off Alaska’s coast, has to be a critical component of our long-term energy security strategy and so too does responsible onshore domestic production. Yet there are troubling signs that the Obama administration is attempting to stifle particularly in my state the critical onshore component of America’s ability to produce its own energy.

The coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) holds up to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil. While this area was set aside by Congress in 1980 for later consideration of whether to permit oil and gas production there, a federal agency is now undertaking a “review” of the management plan of the refuge a review that seems aimed at laying the groundwork for a wilderness designation that would bar production.

But it is not only ANWR that the Obama administration seems intent on locking up. Federal agencies are also now blocking oil development in the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska. . . .

America, particularly in Alaska, has vast reserves of onshore and offshore oil and gas. The crisis in the Gulf should not be used to implement a misguided strategy that shuts down the opportunities to develop these resources and that further endangers our nation’s long-term energy security.”

Read the whole thing here. WSJ 6/2/10 The Gulf Spill and Alaska — We see signs that the Obama administration wants to use the disaster to shut down oil production even in the safest areas.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704596504575272991022477222.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Or read Chapter 8 of Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America, titled “Domestic Disturbance: Locking up our resources and shutting down the economy,” which explores this insanity in much more detail. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1596985992/ref=nosim/nationalreviewon

PERMALINK 06/02/10 10:40 AM

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Planet Gore
The hot blog.
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/56213/embracing-energy-insecurity/chris-horner

Embracing Energy Insecurity
June 01, 2010 12:30 PM By Chris Horner

If you enjoy “The West’s Wrong Turn on Natural Resources” in today’s WSJ by Joseph Sternberg, then you’ll particularly appreciate Chapter 9 of Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America, entitled “Insecurity Complex.” Here is an excerpt following on Sternberg’s thesis: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704596504575272790583630252.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

“The security implications of cap-and-trade, a low carbon fuel standard, green jobs boondoggles, and sealing off domestic resources are many. Foreign dependence, lack of resiliency, and economic uncertainty all make us more vulnerable. . . . Few also dispute that higher energy costs harm the economy, and therefore harm people. Higher energy costs also make recession more likely energy price spikes have preceded every such downturn in modern times and harder to escape. They mean higher utility bills, higher prices at the pump, and higher costs for food. This reduces consumers’ real wages and purchasing power, and signal higher inflation. It also offsets meager, targeted tax cuts pushed by administrations whose policies drive up these prices with the other hand, which essentially creates a tax hike. Energy tax hikes are among the most regressive, meaning they most hurt seniors and the poor. …

Further, Obama’s own (largely debunked) environmentalist dogma should tell him it is foolish for us to artificially concentrate a quarter of our entire domestic oil output, and more than ten percent of domestic natural-gas production, in Hurricane Alley, as we do currently. By imposing policies that make it difficult to change this, he ensures it will continue, just as we finally recognize the peril. This compounds the security-of-supply issues he mentions in his rhetoric decrying reliance on other countries for our energy. We have massive resources both on-shore and in less storm-prone areas, so this need not be the case, but for politics.

But Obama has said that our current policies (which he is making vastly worse) actually encourage “over-investment” in oil and gas production. This reflects a belief that energy security somehow comes from making energy more expensive. So you should not be surprised that Obama’s energy secretary runs around the country saying things like we have to figure out how to triple the cost of a gallon of gasoline. He specifically cited Europe’s prices as the goal “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe”whose prices at the time he said that averaged about eight dollars, and were over eleven dollars per gallon in some places when ours rose to four dollars. Since we all pay the same for a barrel of oil, Europe’s punitive taxation is to blame for its extraordinarily higher prices.”

The chapter goes on to deconstruct numerous absurdities that turn the notion of “energy security” on its head, all underlying the notion that the anti-energy agenda is really a national-security agenda. (Apparently, they had to first try to sell “global warming” and cap-and-trade because people just don’t take national security seriously. Ahem.) My favorite is the idea that China by supposedly “eating our lunch” in the great windmill race puts us at greater risk. It’s hard to get sillier than that, and I have great fun pointing out why and how they do manage to come close with other feints. Read Power Grab, and enjoy the specifics. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1596985992/ref=nosim/nationalreviewon

PERMALINK 06/01/10 12:30 PM