We’ve finally pretty much gotten off the topic of health care reform and Congress is taking a break – thank goodness for small favors. (Now if we could get the regulators to take a few weeks off, perhaps the nation may catch its breath.)
Before the holidays began, though, my friend Jane Van Ryan told me about a post by the Institute for Energy Research at their blog, which also drew some comments from her at the Energy Tomorrow blog. She suggested it may not be a bad topic to explore in the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day and I agreed – hence what you see here.
Count me among those who wonder just what happened to common sense in this country. The history presented by IER presents a litany of poor decisions in the wake of a threat to our industrial superiority and quite possibly our way of life. While I’m quite aware that oil, coal, and natural gas aren’t going to last forever, the idea of abandoning all three in the name of “green” energy (based in turn on the dubious theory that mankind is warming the globe through excess carbon emissions) makes me wonder if those in charge of our nation really don’t want to cede global leadership to a tyrannical Communist nation.
Maybe this is a poor time for the “what if” scenario I bring up (considering it’s the holidays and all that jazz) but the process of placing ourselves at the mercy of other nations for our immediate needs once again places us in a similar position as we were in 1973 and 1979 – many may not be old enough to recall gas lines stretching around the block and purchasing of gasoline only allowed on odd or even days depending on your license plate number. (Random thought: what happens if you own a letter-only vanity plate then?) As I often say in one manner or another, it’s pretty tough to make your Ford Focus run on wind power or depend on the sun to move your Toyota pickup.
One also has to wonder how many jobs are being created in Canada and other nations by the Chinese investment while we play around and wait to see which companies will be benefitted most by the cap-and-trade lottery going on in the halls of Congress and bowels of the Department of Energy bureaucracy. As the IER points out, unlike us the Chinese aren’t well-blessed with energy supplies of their own so they have to be aggressive in securing the energy for their growing needs.
While many on the left would argue that the current market has been shaped by government policy favoring the consumption of fossil fuels, I think the role of our current fuels of choice would have been played out regardless of these policies. Our leadership in technology made the world conform and that was helped along by finding methods of powering our needs derived from sources which were both cheapest and easily convertible. For years we maintained our growth through domestic oil but eventually we needed to begin getting more and more of our supplies from overseas. Part of the reason was the playing out of domestic oil fields but the other part was seeing more and more prospective areas placed off limits by do-gooder environmentalists and increasing regulations on drilling and exploration by the federal government. Oil companies simply found it easier to go to other nations, extract their supplies, and bring them back here as a measure for cost effectiveness. A similar fate is shared by the natural gas and coal industries – although they don’t have the same amount of foreign competition, overregulation makes it difficult to take full advantage of the abundant supplies we still have.
Now we find ourselves behind the eight-ball because our appetite for energy isn’t being quenched by the supply we have. The oil, coal, and natural gas we need is senselessly locked away under land and ocean areas deemed off-limits by a federal government which seems determined to move to “green” energy whatever the cost in tax revenues and leasing fees uncollected and jobs not created (or saved, for that matter.)
On the other hand, our rivals in China are unhindered by these regulations and for them it’s, “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” As I see it, those in power inside the Beltway seem only too happy to allow someone else to becomes the world leader but damn it, I’d at least like to see them put up a fight.
We can put so many people to work if we were only willing to give the oil and natural gas industry a chance to do so. There’s nothing wrong with building windmills and solar panels, but a true energy palette should have some shades of brown and black to go along with green. Brown, black, and green can be a prescription for prosperity for the red, white, and blue.
Energy independence is an unrealistic and foolish goal. It just isn’t going to happen and there’s nothing wrong with us buying energy from foreign companies. It wasn’t the oil embargo that led to the gas lines you remember but government price controls. I agree with you that government needs to get out of the way of energy exploration and open up more federal land for it, but if we set a national energy policy of energy independence it will be just as reckless as a policy of no fossil fuel use.