“Energy Independence” is a canard.
If the US fails to use lowest cost energy supplies, where ever they may come from, it acts only to subsidize the energy use of China India and the EU.
In a relatively free market, the price mechanism allocates resources efficiently, something Congress has never done, and cannot do, because it is comprised of stupid people responding to hysterical deceptions propigated by our leftist dominated media. When it is more efficient to manufacture and use an alternative technology, the market will shift to it, if the forces of supply and demand are left alone to react to changing conditions and changing technologies. Only the ultimate users can evaluate and chose among competing technologies as to what is most useful to them in a particular application.
Coercive government action creating a mandated preference for particular technologies, is by definition a giant waste of money, and will for certain, have massive unforeseen consequences.
Free speech itself, is eroded and devalued, if consumers are not free to express their market choices, except only as to government approved energy sources and forms. Freedom of association, which can only be fairly read to have encompassed freedom to chose with whom and as to what one deals commercially, was long ago diminsished and eviserated by the political and intellectual elite, whose dominate motive in life is the seeking of CONTROL over others whom they envy.
It may seem like a light bulb to some, but it is the United States of American and its founding principles that are being rendered obsolete by the current round of environmental ideology. Such principles may be regarded as irrelevant abstractions by many, but when and if this latest round of government imperatives, restrictions and reproaches (how dare you drive an SUV?) are substantially implemented and epidemic of economic polio will visit the American economy... read: your job, your income, your real estate and investment values will all be diminished... like it or not you will be buying more than Healthcare from your friendly HMO.
Well spoken. Boondoggles are the most likely result of these mandates. A boondoggle is a wasted investment. The push in the 1990s for low earth satellite technology to provide high speed internet service was a boondoggle. Private industry makes wrong bets but private capital is at stake, not public tax dollars. Private industry boondoggles are terminated and future investors learn from the failures. Unfortunately, government boondoggles never end. Instead of terminating them, more tax revenue is directed towards them. Here are some government boondoggles:
- Social security: a generational Ponzi scheme
- Medicare: a generational Ponzi scheme
- Medicaid: creeping universal insurance
- Farm subsidies: the power of sparsely populated farm states in the US Senate
- Flood insurance: making the rest pay for risky home choices
- Space station: what has been accomplished other than to subsidize the Russian space program?
With this new energy bill, you can add ethanol mandates and bio fuel mandates. If the rats get their way, you can add renewable mandates.