Dear Comrade Obama: You're Wrong on Energy and Here's Why

By John Ransom
TownHall.com

Dear Comrade Obama,

Thanks for nothing. Really.

No website, no stimulus, no green energy-- no real energy-- no healthcare, no foreign policy, no jobs, no security, no recovery.

If Comrade Obama isn’t going to use our domestic energy supply, can the rest of us borrow it for a while? --A. Lincoln (paraphrased)

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was plagued by generals who wouldn’t act, who wouldn’t fight battles, develop plans, or win victories despite his reliance on the some of the best students of war the country had produced thus far. The United States military academy produced for the Northern armies a series of technically competent engineer-generals, who were often reluctant to fight to the finish, or even fight at all. The most maddening case was that of General George B. McClellan.

Known as Little Mac, McClellan was popular with his soldiers in the Army of the Potomac because he looked after their needs, he was a terrific administrator, but above all, he made his troops feel like real soldiers.

His one great defect was a big one though: He wouldn’t fight. And when forced to fight, he fought so pusillanimously that it vexed Lincoln to distraction. Some even questioned whether McClellan had political motives for not fighting vigorously. His later demonstrated sympathy for the rebels and his campaign for president on a “negotiated peace” platform do give one pause.

During one particularly galling stretch of inactivity when Lincoln couldn’t even get McClellan to inform him, as president and commander in chief, of the general’s plan to attack the enemy, Lincoln asked some of his other military advisors if they though thought he could borrow the Army of the Potomac for a little while since General McClellan wasn’t using it.

Lincoln’s point was that it did the country no good to develop the resource of a competent army if it wasn’t going to be employed effectively.

The same can be said about the strongest resources our country has today. Where we have plenty, many politicians see only poverty and want; where we have want and poverty, some politicians see only votes.

This is certainly true of our energy policy, which has been based on false assumptions, outright lies, political calculation, and a reckless disregard for the American economy.

One fatal flaw that’s plagued the Obama administration - throughout both terms - is the administration’s complete, total and historical misunderstanding regarding how energy prices, energy security and energy production affect the economy. And this neglect of understanding how some of the country’s most abundant natural resources work on the economy, does the country great harm.

Science-- the branch of learning that Liberals say they have a monopoly on-- tends to prove what has become more apparent under Obama: On energy policy, conservatives are right and Liberals are wrong.

Liberals aren’t just a little wrong either. They are really, really wrong; once-in-a-lifetime, disastrously wrong. That is, if grading on the scale the rest of us are subject to.

Grading on the liberal scale, however, their policy disaster on energy is just the normal, everyday, run of the mill errors in judgment, math, worldview, physics and fluid mechanics that liberals deal with all the time. Liberal efforts to “wish” the world to Utopia while their leaders are busy creating Dystopia for all but a select few, tends to lead them—and the rest of us-- into a trap of the fantastic, unworkable idea time after time.

So, let’s just say that this latest discovery, that we are right and they are wrong on energy, shouldn’t shock us.

After all, we were right about the stimulus, we were right about jobs, we were right about Obama being a socialist of some variety, we were right about Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Benghazi.

We were right about Libya being a pretty bad idea; we were right about Dodd-Frank’s overall suckiness and the mortgage mess being caused by bad liberal policy; we were right about Obama wanting to raise taxes on everyone who had a job. We were right about liberals trying to take guns from everyone… and we were right about Obama having contempt for the Constitution.

But on this latest error—this error in energy-- I say again: We are really right, and they are really wrong; once-in-a-lifetime, disastrously wrong.

Here’s how: The London branch of Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC) has released a report on shale oil and gas that has the Left afraid. Sore afraid to quoteth old King James.

Here’s the frightening truth the liberals don’t want people to know: “Shale oil (light tight oil) is rapidly emerging as a significant and relatively low cost new unconventional resource in the US,” wrote PWC in its February, 2013 report Shale oil: the next energy revolution. “There is potential for shale oil production to spread globally over the next couple of decades. If it does, it would revolutionize global energy markets, providing greater long term energy security at lower cost for many countries.”

And of course the Left cannot afford that kind of nonsense. Energy and economic growth? Where does it all end?

Jobs, that’s where. And Liberals can’t have that.

Obama’s problem- if we take him at his word, which is always dangerous- is that he’s president, not emperor.

Imagine Obama as emperor, when the operations of all of government would be up to him. Ha!

Personally, I’m confident that if I were president for just one year, we’d have one of the most robust economies, not just in the world, but also in our history.
 
The economic problems that we face aren’t unsolvable and neither are the political problems that we face.

Smarter regulation of the financial services sector is paramount, combined with developing our domestic energy resources. New technologies in old energy sources that allow us to “sequester” carbon, develop domestic stocks and innovate, will quickly turn us into an energy powerhouse worldwide.

“The use of new drilling techniques to tap oil and gas in shale rocks far underground helped add 158,000 new oil and gas jobs over the past five years,” writes the Wall Street Journal “and economists think that it has created even more jobs in companies supplying the energy industry and in the broader services industry.”

“This is probably the biggest stimulus we have going,” Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research told the WSJ.

According to the Journal “$145 billion will be spent drilling and completing wells this year, up from $13 billion in 2000.”

While it’s estimated that Canada may have as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil in reserves, “the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the [US] has 4.3 trillion barrels of in-place oil shale resources centered in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, said Helen Hankins, Colorado director for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management” according to the Associated Press.

4.3 trillion barrels is 16 times the reserves of Saudi Arabia, or enough oil to supply the US for 600 years.

As I have pointed out all along, the Keystone issue isn’t about the safety of a pipeline. Obama and enviro-whacko friends know that if they allow Canadian tar sands oil to be developed via the Keystone pipeline, that the US will also start to develop their own tar-sands and shale oil. The US contains well over 600 years of known reserves and that would allow the US to be a net exporter of oil. If that happens, the green economy ruse that the left has sponsored, already reeling from bankruptcies and cronyism, would collapse. It would show that there is no shortage of oil and “green” energy can not compete with fossil fuels.
The only thing left then for those bitter climate clingers would be the shoddy science of Global Something-or-Another.

Oil from tar sands, reports the BBC on the Keystone decision, “is so plentiful that full-scale development would seriously delay the transition to low-carbon alternative fuels,” which is the holy grail of the left. And along the way, the U.S. would create at least 10 million new U.S. jobs, keeping around $500 billion per year here at home. Over twenty years that would be an additional $12.5 trillion in GDP even at a modest 2 percent growth rate. At 4 percent the numbers are closer to $15.5 trillion.