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Jewish World Review Jan. 26, 2011 / 21 Shevat, 5771 Greening America will soon turn the folks red By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The price of oil is approaching $100 a barrel, which probably means gasoline prices between $4 and $5 a gallon this summer.
The chief reason why the price of oil and most other commodities has been soaring is because the Federal Reserve has been printing tons of money. More dollars chasing fewer goods means higher prices for those goods.
And the Obama administration has all but shut down drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and has cancelled four oil lease sales in Alaska. There were fewer new wells drilled for oil on public lands in 2010 than in any other year in the past decade.
This is costing thousands of Americans their jobs, costing the Treasury hundreds of millions of dollars from lease fees and in tax revenues, and is driving the price of oil higher.
The president imposed a drilling moratorium in the Gulf after BP's Macondo well exploded last April, killing 11. The moratorium has done more economic harm to the U.S. than the oil spill did to the environment. Sea life in the Gulf has tripled since before the spill, according to a study released in November by the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, a consortium of 22 colleges and universities in Alabama.
BP has by far the worst safety record of any major oil company. It's refineries in Texas and Ohio accounted for 97 percent of the "egregious, willful" violations handed out in the last three years by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
BP cut corners in the days before the oil spill, according to company documents obtained by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The British company was aided in evading safety rules by lax oversight by the Minerals Management Service.
Yet when the Oil Spill Commission President Obama appointed issued its report Jan. 11, it blamed the entire industry, not this one rogue company. Could this be because BP has contributed more money to Barack Obama than to any other politician?
There were politicians, academics and environmental activists on the seven member commission, but not a single expert from the oil and gas industry.
Environmentalists claim we could replace oil and coal with "green" energy sources. But renewable resources (except for dams, which environmentalists don't like), account for less than two percent of the electricity generated in the United States. Only those who slept through physics class in high school think they could contribute much more.
Wind and solar power, the president's favorites, are enormously expensive. According to the Energy Information Administration, the cheapest way to generate a kilowatt hour of electricity is by burning natural gas in a combined cycle unit. Wind is 88 percent more expensive; solar 399 percent more expensive. They can compete only when government mandates their use, or provides massive subsidies.
Jeffrey Leonard founded the Global Environment Fund, which invests in "green" energy projects. But he thinks all energy subsidies should be eliminated.
"Major changes in...domestic energy supply make it possible to sweep away decades of subsidies without seriously threatening the affordability of energy," Mr. Leonard wrote in the Washington Post Jan. 14.
The "game changer," he said, is the discovery of vast new fields of exploitable natural gas. In addition to being the cheapest way to generate electricity, natural gas can -- with only modest adjustments to our carburetors -- replace gasoline in our fuel tanks.
Natural gas is by far the cleanest of fossil fuels. The principal byproducts of its combustion are carbon dioxide and water vapor. But to produce an equivalent amount of energy, emissions of CO2 from burning natural gas are only 71 percent of oil, 56 percent of coal.
Extreme environmentalists call carbon dioxide a pollutant, but it is perverse to describe plant food -- which is what CO2 is --that way. They claim CO2 emissions dangerously warm the planet. But with much of the world shivering with record cold, and with real world data conflicting with computer models that predict global warming, few see this as much of a threat.
Our budget deficit would be smaller, our economy stronger, and our environment cleaner if markets, and not politicians, determine from what sources we get our energy, Mr. Leonard thinks.
"The U.S. energy market, if left to its own devices, without distortions or subsidies, will provide plentiful and affordable energy while gradually evolving away from oil and coal as primary fuel sources," he said.
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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.
© 2009, Jack Kelly |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
