Posted on 03/24/2011 6:53:36 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Gas is well over $4 a gallon in most places in California — and soaring elsewhere as well. But are such high energy prices good or bad?
That should be a stupid question. Yet it is not, when the Obama administration has stopped new domestic offshore oil exploration in many American waters, curbed oil leases in the West, and keeps oil-rich areas of Alaska exempt from drilling. Last week, President Obama went to Brazil and declared of that country’s new offshore finds: “With the new oil finds off Brazil, President [Dilma] Rousseff has said that Brazil wants to be a major supplier of new stable sources of energy, and I’ve told her that the United States wants to be a major customer, which would be a win-win for both our countries.”
Consider the logic of the president’s Orwellian declaration: The United States in the last two years has restricted oil exploration of the sort Brazil is now rushing to embrace. We have run up more than $4 trillion in consecutive budget deficits during the Obama administration and are near federal insolvency. Therefore, the United States should be happy to borrow more money to purchase the sort of “new stable sources of energy” from Brazil’s offshore wells that we most certainly will not develop off our own coasts.
It seems as if paying lots more for electricity and gas, in European fashion, was originally part of the president’s new green agenda. He helped push cap-and-trade legislation through the House of Representatives in 2009. Had such Byzantine regulations become law, a recessionary economy would have sunk into depression. Obama appointed the incompetent Van Jones as “green-jobs czar” — until Jones’s wild rantings confirmed that he knew nothing about his job description “to advance the administration’s climate and energy initiatives.”
At a time of trillion-dollar deficits, the administration is borrowing billions to promote high-speed rail, and is heavily invested in the federally subsidized $42,000 Government Motors Chevy Volt. Apparently the common denominator here is a deductive view that high energy prices will force Americans to emulate European centrally planned and state-run transportation.
That conclusion is not wild conspiracy theory, but simply the logical manifestation of many of the Obama administration’s earlier campaign promises. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu — now responsible for the formulation of American energy policy — summed up his visions to the Wall Street Journal in 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” I think Chu is finally figuring out the “somehow.”
A year earlier, Chu was more explicit in his general contempt for the sort of fuels that now keep Americans warm and on the road: “Coal is my worst nightmare. . . . We have lots of fossil fuel. That’s really both good and bad news. We won’t run out of energy but there’s enough carbon in the ground to really cook us.”
In fairness to Chu, he was only amplifying what Obama himself outlined during the 2008 campaign. Today’s soaring energy prices are exactly what candidate Obama once dreamed about: “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” Obama, like Chu, made that dream even more explicit in the case of coal: “So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
There are lots of ironies to these Alice-in-Wonderland energy fantasies. As the public becomes outraged over gas prices, a panicked Obama pivots to brag that we are pumping more oil than ever before — but only for a time, and only because his predecessors approved the type of drilling he has stopped.
The entire climate-change movement, fairly or not, is now in shambles, thanks to serial scandals about faked research, consecutive record cold and wet winters in much of Europe and the United States, and the conflict-of-interest, get-rich schemes of prominent global-warming preachers such as Al Gore.
The administration’s energy visions are formulated by academics and government bureaucrats who live mostly in cities with short commutes and have worked largely for public agencies. These utopians have no idea that without reasonably priced fuel and power, the self-employed farmer cannot produce food. The private plant operator cannot create plastics. And the trucker cannot bring goods to the consumer — all the basics like lettuce, iPads, and Levis that a highly educated, urbanized elite both enjoys and yet has no idea of how a distant someone else made their unbridled consumption possible.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern
The Socialist Howard Dean, former head of the DNC, was happy on CNBC yesterday that gas prices were going up because people would be forced to use “alternative sources of energy.”
Howard ought to be forbidden to use any fossil fuels to travel, heat and light his home and office. Let him exist on wind and solar energy.
Last night I had a lib shouting at me that in Italy they don’t use so much electricity, and they have to turn on the heater when they want hot water, and in America they have cheaper fuel and we use so much of it! She was really getting worked up.
I calmly replied, “OK. What’s your point?”
She said “We have it so easy here.”
I said, “You were just telling me how hard it is to make ends meet. So what you’re saying is, you want fuel prices to go up so that the Saudis will get more of our money?”
She said “No, that money should be going to research renewable energy.”
This was after we’d discussed—and both agreed—that the technology isn’t there.
I don’t think she understood why I was just staring at her in silence at this point. I changed the subject without comment.
During the 2008 elections she mentioned the Hope and Change thing to me.
I said: “You want change?”
She said: “Yes!”
I Replied: “Well a gallon of gas has always cost less than a gallon of milk, that will change with Obama.”
Then she shut up.
Obama’s Energy Sec, Chu(?), was on with Chris Wallace this past Sunday.
He seemed very content to see gas prices soaring. Paraphrasing, he said it will force us to drive less and push faster for alternative green sources.
If you look at the history, every fiscal quarter. The price of gas under Obama has gradually creeped up. And never comes back down (like under previous presidents). This has been his plan all along. He said it during his campaign.
5th day of spring here in NH. And we’re expecting a fresh inch of global warming.
They desperately want to believe that they are good and that the articles of their liberal faith makes them a good person. To pierce that liberal belief system would force them to face themselves with honesty rather than self protecting illusion.
Look closely (between the lines) at what Maddow and other liberals peddle. They constantly reinforce the idea that liberals are smart and others not of their faith are morons. They constantly reinforce to one another that they are good an righteous and are, themselves, the true saviors of others the planet. Watch next time. These people are among the most deceived on the planet. Their faith in liberalism is so irrational that they are truly flummoxed when facts are laid in their full view. They simply cannot respond because you are asking them to affirm what their own eyes are clearly showing them and this would compel them to renounce their liberal doctrine which they derive all their self worth. Hence, as you note, you witness this almost comic juxtaposition.
Great observations. The thing that cracks me up is their contempt for Christians, because ‘they believe in that mythology over science,’ yet they have a religious belief in people like Al Gore and Keith Olbermann, whose contempt for facts is invisible to them because they believe what FEEEEEELS right to them.
I had an astonishing conversation with a liberal (I attract them like a magnet here in Boston) the other night, who knew what I did for a living. He went on about how ‘young black kids are’ this that and the other ‘because rich white racists have taken away their choices, so that’s all they’ve got.’ I carefully pointed out his racist idea that all blacks were this, and all blacks were powerless, and so on.
Are you surprised to learn that he didn’t get it, and considered me, the conservative who works with poor minorities, the bigot? :)
Highly educated, urbanized elite find hose next to car tank empty scratches head.
Damn the feds and just DRILL!!
The governor of Alaska should just as many drilling permits as desired. To hell with that Washington thinks.
What are the feds going to do? Send in the military to stop the drilling? Not likely.
States rights take precedence over illegal federal decrees. Drill.
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