A ‘Green’ Catastrophe in the Making
By
Arnold Ahlert
JWR.com
Since 1973,
Americans have been watching an accident in slow
motion. That was the year that the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), began to
understand the economic leverage they had over
Western, oil-dependent nations. At that point
America, whose last year of energy self-sufficiency
was 1950, was importing 35% of its energy. Over the
next two years, in retaliation for the unsuccessful
attempt by several Arab nations to annihilate Israel
in the Yom Kippur War, OPEC more than tripled the
price of a barrel of oil. A severe recession
occurred, and people were forced to wait in long
lines on alternate days to buy gasoline. In terms of
energy independence or stability, we've never
recovered.
On 1 October
1977, The Department of Energy (DOE) became a
reality as the result of the Department of Energy
Organization Act. Its responsibilities included
dealing with energy development, research, and
national security. This cabinet-level Department was
an outgrowth of the Nixon administration's Federal
Energy Office, which was replaced by the Federal
Energy Administration (FEA) an agency tasked with
controlling oil's allocation and prices for three
years.
In 1974, Gerald
Ford established the Energy Research and Development
Administration (ERDA) which was followed by a flurry
of bills, including the The Solar Heating and
Cooling Act of 1974, the Geothermal Energy Research,
Development, and Demonstration Act of 1974, and the
Solar Energy Research, Development, and
Demonstration Act of 1974. All of these efforts were
aimed at encouraging research on renewable energy.
The Department of Energy was an effort to
re-organize federal agencies. At the time, president
Jimmy Carter attempted to vest the Secretary of
Energy with the power to set wholesale electricity
rates and crude oil prices. Congress gave that power
to the independent Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission (FERC) instead.
In 1970, the
Environmental Protection Agency was formed to
consolidate various federal program connected with
the environment. That same year Congress passed the
Clean Air Act, giving EPA the power to set and
America to achieve national air standards. The EPA
had much success in several arenas, such as reducing
pollution levels throughout the country, from acid
rain in the Northeast to smog in California, getting
lead out of gasoline, regulating toxic chemicals,
and protecting the nation's drinking water.
No doubt these
agencies were created with the best of intentions.
Yet when one considers that the primary impetus for
creating the Department of Energy was to make this
country as energy self-sufficient as possible
(Richard Nixon was hoping to achieve such a goal by
1980), how can one contend that it is anything less
than a spectacular failure? America's reliance on
imported oil has risen to almost 70%, we haven't
built a nuclear reactor in this country in over
three decades (even as France gets 75% of its
electricity from nuclear), and so-called alternative
energy development has been revealed for the
unrealistic solution it truly is at best, to the
outright fraud of a "jobs-producing green agenda,"
at worst.
Yet this
failure cannot be blame on the DOE alone. The EPA
has abetted that failure with its attempt to impose
costly energy regulations on businesses and
consumers to "save the planet from man-made global
warming"--a task it apparently intends to implement
with or without Congressional approval. Furthermore,
the Obama administration's recalcitrance in
addressing America's genuine energy needs problem is
so severe, a contempt of court ruling was issued
against its Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, for
defying a court order to end the moratorium on
off-shore drilling. This third government agency,
which forms an unholy triumvirate with the DOE and
the EPA, is also doing everything it can to suppress
domestic energy exploration and production.
How unrealistic
are these efforts? First, as the Wall Street Journal
reports, while American deep-water oil production is
languishing, "in other parts of the
world...deep-water drilling has continued at a
frenetic pace. The industry is moving full speed
ahead in places like the Gulf of Guinea, the
Mediterranean and the Turkish Black Sea." Second,
China and India have resolutely refused to limit
their production of greenhouse gases, which, while
associated with so-called global warming, are also
inextricably associated with economic development.
Third, many European nations, most notably Germany
and Spain, have stopped subsidizing green energy
projects, largely in recognition of the fact that
the costs far outweigh the benefits.
One may
question the wisdom of such developments, but one
fact remains beyond dispute: as long as other
nations are pursuing their own agendas, any
unilateral attempt by the United States to "save the
planet" is doomed to fail.
None of this,
nor the fact that America spends billions upon
billions of dollars buying oil from regimes that
hate us, support terror, or are in the throes of
violent upheaval has altered this administration's
determination to "wean America off oil," even as
nothing remotely viable is available to take its
place. Even as the unrest in Libya has sent price
shocks through the oil industry, the president told
a group of executives last week that "we actually
think that we'll be able to ride out the Libya
situation and it will stabilize."
Such an
assessment is an astonishing disconnect from
reality. Our third largest supplier of oil, Saudi
Arabia, is facing its own Facebook-generated "Day of
Rage" scheduled for March 11th. While the trajectory
of any demonstrations there is more likely to follow
what happened to protests in Iran, where uprisings
have been successfully suppressed--as opposed to the
number of Middle East nations where they have
not--anything which threatens Saudi oil production
would be nothing short of catastrophic with regard
to oil prices and the American economy. "Riding out"
such an event would be impossible, with predictions
of oil rising to $200-per barrel or more.
All of which
may begin to happen in less than two weeks time.
For the last
four decades, Americans, who favor domestic energy
production by a two-to-one margin, have been told
that we are being "held hostage" by oil-exporting
nations. That is, quite simply, a lie. America is
holding itself hostage, courtesy of progressives for
whom no amount of economic upheaval, no number of
job losses, and no increase in the national debt or
deficit spending is too high a price to pay for the
continued implementation of their "green" agenda.
Even America's national security is a secondary
consideration for a movement whose philosophy can be
reduced to one over-riding idea:
We have to destroy America in order to save it.
[Quote: Oct. 28, 2008: We are FOUR DAYS AWAY from
fundamentally transforming the United States of
America! The Destroyer in Chief is hard at work
with his agenda.]
Fasten your
government-mandated seat belts, my fellow Americans.
We may be headed for one of the bumpiest rides in
the history of the nation. And President Obama, who
once warned that his energy policies will "bankrupt"
the coal industry, make electricity rates
"skyrocket," and "break our dependence on oil," the
man who promised "fundamentally transform America"
during the 2008 election campaign will be leading
the charge.