David

Karki

Read David's bio and previous columns here

April 21, 2008

Energy Policy: Drill, Baby, Drill . . . Or Get Ready For Hell

Crude oil hit $114 a barrel this weekend. Gas prices are pushing $4 a gallon, and could well hit $5 by the time Memorial Day and summer driving season arrives. At what point will we finally restore sanity to our national energy policy? Or even have a policy, for that matter?

How much longer will we go on, refusing to acquire the plentiful energy resources under our own land and waters and then sending mountains of money to people who would celebrate our destruction? And on top of that, indulging the liberty-crushing, economy-wrecking pipe dreams of the radical environmentalist crowd in response to a “crisis” that's entirely non-existent?

Sadly, it seems everyone inside the Beltway has gotten knee-walking drunk from the green Kool-Aid chug-a-lug. Even President Bush has come out with a bill to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, if only to stave off a far worse bill authored by Senators Joe Lieberman and John Warner. Never mind that they haven't the slightest idea how to make their absurd requirements become reality. Apparently, they'll just wave the magic wand of government, and poof! We'll just not emit carbon without any reduction in living standards. This is breathtaking hubris, even by the pathetically low standard of U.S. senators.

The only way to get where they would force us to go is to simply deny energy to the citizenry. Sen. Barack Obama has already indicated as much in a recent primary debate, saying that the only way to lower prices is to lower demand. In other words, he'll be a Seinfeldian Energy Nazi: “No energy for you!” (I wonder, is he going to station troops at gas stations and electrical meters on people's homes to ensure no one consumes too much? Just how totalitarian and dictatorial would the enforcement mechanisms have to be?) Liberals believe in “energy independence” all right – independence from energy by not having any.

No technology currently exists to take the place of oil in any substantial way, and if it did it wouldn't need huge government subsidies to prop it up. What's more, we have plenty of oil in ANWR (enough to import none from Saudi Arabia for 20 years), in North Dakota, in the Gulf of Mexico (which Cuba is drilling with China's help, but we won't) and off the Pacific coast. Natural gas, too.

Anyone with an ounce of common sense would realize that, to be energy independent and able to handle inevitable periodic supply disruptions – be that due to hurricanes or hostile vendors – we need to have much more domestic stock and the refinery infrastructure to handle it. And if we're going to have any significant portion of the car fleet go electric, we'll need numerous new power plants to provide that electricity.

Instead, we have supplies so short and refinery infrastructure so crimped that even worthless environmental regulations requiring winter and summer boutique gasoline blends – which force refineries offline each spring to change over – are enough to cause price spikes.  And we have outright bans on any new refinery or nuclear power plant construction, so aging older (and dirtier by comparison) coal-fired plants have to keep running. This in a nation that will add another 63 million people worth of energy demand by 2030, and a world where 2.4 billion Chinese and Indians want to stay warm in the winter and drive cars just as much as anyone.

A sensible policy would expedite the accessing of all available domestic supplies of oil and natural gas, build sufficient refinery capacity to withstand any disruption, repeal both the federal gas tax (it only funds pork spending; let states maintain the roads within their respective borders and all of us save 18.4 cents a gallon) and frivolous regulations that only add expense to production while doing nothing for the environment. Then with that new leverage, the oligopoly of OPEC would be forced to cut prices to keep us as customers in some capacity.

And get rid of all ethanol subsidies and mandates, which only act as a food tax that goes for an inefficient boondoggle that would take far more arable land and water to produce than we can possibly spare. (Again, if ethanol can work, it doesn't need the crutch of government.) Nothing is more stupid than a nation tearing up its food supply for a frivolous energy source while vast amounts of the tried-and-true remain untapped and ready to use.

As for electricity, build lots of new nuclear power plants to replace older coal and gas fired ones, as well as to handle supplying the increasing demand that electric cars will inevitably bring. Nuclear power is safe and clean. Even the French get 70-plus percent of their power from nuclear. What little waste is produced can be shot into outer space if people are too irrationally freaked out to have it buried at Yucca Mountain or some such equivalent. (Space being, after all, full of billions of nuclear furnaces called stars.)

We cannot continue down this pie-in-the-sky primrose path, and expect that there will not be severe negative consequences that affect us all for having allowed the radical, blind-to-reality global warming cultists to create policy for a world that only exists in their far-left totalitarian fantasies. At some point we have to demolish the barriers they have created and reclaim what is rightfully ours – and more importantly, what keeps us a free and prosperous people – before it's too late.

If we do not grow a spine and go to war against the radical greenies, we will not be able to recognize our civilization much longer. Sky-high food prices, no energy and no liberty at all – not even to choose what kind of light bulb to put in your lamps. Welcome to enviro-wacko utopia, or, as the rest of us call it, Hell.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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