Gas is well over $4 a gallon in most places in California — and soaring elsewhere as well. But are high energy prices good or bad?
That should be a stupid question. Yet the Obama administration has stopped domestic offshore-oil exploration in many US waters, curbed oil leases in the West and keeps oil-rich areas of Alaska exempt from drilling.
Last week, President Obama went to Brazil and declared of that country’s offshore finds: “With the new oil finds off Brazil, President [Dilma] Rousseff has said that Brazil wants to be a major supplier of new stable sources of energy, and I’ve told her that the United States wants to be a major customer, which would be a win-win for both our countries.”
Consider the logic of Obama’s Orwellian declaration: America in the last two years has restricted oil exploration of the sort Brazil is now rushing to embrace. We’ve run up more than $4 trillion in consecutive budget deficits during the Obama administration and are near federal insolvency. Therefore, America should be happy to borrow more money to purchase the sort of “new stable sources of energy” from Brazil’s offshore wells that we most certainly won’t develop off our own coasts.
It seems as if paying lots more for electricity and gas, as in Europe, was originally part of Obama’s green agenda. He helped push cap-and-trade legislation through the House in 2009. Had such regulations become law, a recession would have sunk into a depression. Obama appointed the incompetent Van Jones as “green-jobs czar” — until Jones’ wild rantings confirmed that he knew nothing about his job description.
At a time of trillion-dollar deficits, the administration is borrowing billions to promote high-speed rail, and is heavily invested in the federally subsidized $42,000 Chevy Volt. The common denominator is a deductive view that high energy prices will force Americans to emulate European centrally planned transportation.
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu — now responsible for the formulation of US energy policy — summed up his visions to The Wall Street Journal in 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
Today’s soaring energy prices are exactly what candidate Obama once dreamed about during the 2008 campaign: “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” He made that dream even more explicit in the case of coal: “So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
There are lots of ironies to these Alice-in-Wonderland energy fantasies. As the public becomes outraged over gas prices, a panicked Obama pivots to brag that we’re pumping more oil than ever — but only for a time and only because his predecessors approved the kind of drilling he has stopped.
The climate-change movement is in shambles, thanks to serial scandals about faked research, consecutive record cold and wet winters in much of Europe and America, and the conflict-of-interest, get-rich schemes of such prominent global-warming preachers as Al Gore.
Formulating the administration’s energy visions are academics and government bureaucrats who live mostly in cities with short commutes and have worked largely for public agencies.
These utopians have no idea that without reasonably priced fuel, the farmer can’t produce food. The private-plant operator can’t create plastics. And the trucker can’t bring goods to the consumer — all the basics like lettuce, iPads and Levis that an urbanized elite both enjoys and yet has no idea of how a distant someone else made their unbridled consumption possible.