This is a policy for economic suicide.
Sec. of energy pushes bio-refineries and windmills to oil executives at an energy conference as the administration announces a three-year offshore drilling ban. This is a policy for economic suicide.
Chortling At Chu from IBD Editorials
Future Fuels: Our secretary of energy pushes bio-refineries and windmills to oil executives at an energy conference as the administration announces a three-year offshore drilling ban. This is a policy for economic suicide.
They don’t qualify as an official group of victims, but carbon-Americans, as they have been called, did not have much to cheer about last week, when Energy Secretary Steven Chu addressed CERAWeek 2010, a premier industry conference hosted by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
With an economy struggling to regain sound footing, Chu advocated a starvation diet devoid of additional fossil fuels that are to remain under the ground and seabed. Instead, he supports 53% more funding for wind research and a 22% jump for solar research.
Subsidizing alternative energy fits the classic definition of insanity. Despite huge subsidies, it has proved to be neither cost-effective nor a reliable, significant contributor to our national power grid. Yet we keep subsidizing it, expecting a different result.
“Oil is an ideal transportation fuel, so it will be with us for decades,” Chu conceded, even as the administration forbids us from getting more of it here, creating energy jobs, lowering energy costs and cutting our trade deficit. Instead we’ll rely increasingly on foreign and often unfriendly suppliers.
Chu acknowledged the role cleaner-burning natural gas can play in electricity generation, but only as a “transition to other fuels” in coming years. And the administration continues to gobble up lands where it might be found and impose environmental regulations that curtail the use of new technologies such as fracking to get more oil and natural gas from America’s vast shale deposits.
Equally unimpressed with Chu’s presentation was another speaker. “Gas is more than a bridge fuel,” said James Mulva, CEO of Houston-based ConocoPhillips, noting that huge gas discoveries in recent years in North America in shale and other unconventional rock formations could provide more than a century of supply. “It is part of the long-term energy solution.”
“We must overcome the opposition of the ‘hydrocarbon deniers,'” Mulva said, playing off Al Gore’s term for climate-change skeptics. Hydrocarbon deniers, he said, are those who “believe that renewable energy will quickly and easily replace hydrocarbons and cure all that ails us.”
The headline above a story in the New York Times read, “Oil Execs Chortle as Obama Admin Promotes Renewables.” Except that it’s not funny; it’s tragic. To leave vast stores of domestic energy untapped while Americans are looking for cheap energy and jobs is irresponsible. Unfortunately, this administration has no long-term energy solution, other than hoping for a lot of cloudless and windy days.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar quietly told reporters on Friday that the administration’s six-month delay in approving new offshore drilling leases in federal waters will morph into a three-year total ban. We are forbidden from finding more oil and gas even though a December 2009 Rasmussen poll showed as many Americans want offshore drilling — roughly two-thirds — as oppose administration plans for health care.
After President George W. Bush lifted an executive ban on Outer Continental Shelf leasing, drilling was expected to begin by this July. “Secretary Salazar has finally confirmed what has long been feared — that the Obama administration has no intention of opening new areas for offshore drilling during his four years in office,” said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., ranking member on the House Natural Resources Committee.
A study by Science Applications International Corp. at the request of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, the Gas Technology Institute and others shows that as a result of this administration’s energy policy, the U.S. economy will suffer $2.3 trillion in lost opportunity costs over the next two decades, monies that would go a long way to reining in runaway deficits and creating economic growth.
According to Chu, we’ll just have to grin and bear it.
Help Make A Difference By Sharing These Articles On Facebook, Twitter And Elsewhere:
