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The end of greenism
Raymond S Kraft
It hasn't quite hit the radar of the Liberal Democrats, but as the price of gasoline soars above $4 a gallon, and here in California it's closing in on $5, they're going to be facing a hard choice with no good options. They will be forced to (a) throw the Greens under the bus, and embrace the idea of drilling for oil in America, in ANWR, off the coasts, wherever it may be found, or (b) throw the US economy under the bus, and lose the November election to a Republican landslide, no matter who their candidate is.
If, that is, John McCain can be persuaded to see the light, come to his senses, and make a prime time speech in which he apologizes for being wrong about Global Warming and Climate Change, has learned that CO2 is not the enemy, that humans have no identifiable effect on climate, which has always been changing, and humans cannot stop it; and that it is far more important to produce enough energy from all sources, nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind, oil, and coal, than to go tilting at the windmills of Greenism to stop the unstoppable Climate Change, which is entirely natural and organic.
If John McCain can learn that lesson, he can turn the issue of Global Warming and Climate Change on its head, and use it to take down Barack Obama, take down the Democrat Party, and take down the Greens and Greenism, in the next four months. But it has to be done as a frontal attack, a head-long cavalry charge straight up the hill into the face of the enemy, something neither Obama, nor the Dems, nor the Greens, are prepared for. It would throw them into total panic and disarray.
In yesterday's news, Saturday, June 7, oil prices spiked $10.75 in one day, a new record, closing Friday at $138.54. Unemployment rose 10% in one month, May, from 5% to 5.5%. The Dow dropped 394 points, the biggest drop in over a year. The average working stiff has seen his cost to commute to work and home again double in less than two years, even as the equity in his house plummeted. And airlines are cutting hundreds of flights, and thousands of jobs. The high cost of not drilling for oil in America is going to savage the economy at every level.
Cybercast News Service (CNS News) in a June 6 article, Lawmakers Split on Drilling for Vast Amounts of Oil in USA, reports that the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management estimates there are 139 billion barrels of untapped, recoverable oil onshore and offshore in the United States. This does not include the vast Bakken oil fields of Montana and the Dakotas, or the enormous shale oil deposits in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, or the oil sands of Oklahoma. CNS interviewed four members of congress, and found the Republicans supporting Jed Babbin's call to "drill here, drill now," and Democrats opposed.
Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said, "You've got that right. We can't get it (the oil) because the environmental elitists are preventing that with moratoria saying it would take ten years to get it developed." Representative Mike Pence (R-Ind.) also said Congress should deregulate to allow more drilling. "My sense is that the most direct route is for Congress to take direct action and give the American people more access to American oil."
Representative Mike Honda (D-Calif.) replied, "No," adding that he would "never say never," but that circumstances would have to be "pretty drastic" for him to agree to more drilling. "I am more concerned about Global Warming and the impact of fossil fuel," he said. House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) told CNS he needs to study the issue more, "I haven't studied enough to make that decision."
But, a lot of middle class, working class, and fixed-income Americans have studied the issue quite enough, and they're beginning to get angry, visibly angry, at the inexcusable inaction of Congress. As gas prices continue to rise through the summer, the anger will swell into fury. "Earth to Mike Honda," they'll be saying soon, "For us, your constituents, five dollar gasoline is pretty drastic. Earth to Charlie Rangel, how many years do you have to study to learn what you can learn in a day? If it takes that long, Charlie, are you sure you're smart enough to be a member of Congress?"
Wasn't it Mark Twain who once quipped? — "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. Ah, but I repeat myself."
Presently, we import 5.4 million barrels of oil a day from OPEC countries. At $138 a barrel, that's $745 million dollars a day we're "exporting" to Saudi Arabia and its neighbors. At 40 jobs per million dollars (at $50,000 a year per job) that's 29,800 jobs for Americans we are "outsourcing" to OPEC each day, rather than investing that money in American oil production and American jobs. At 29,800 jobs a day, that's 10,877,000 American jobs we are exporting to OPEC each year, and if the price of oil rises, so will the job loss. Democrats have threatened to punish corporations that outsource jobs to other countries, but the Democrats' own misbegotten Green policies are the No. 1 cause of outsourcing in in America.
At some point, something has to give, and it will either be the US economy, or Greenism, the obsessive-compulsive Environmentalist Personality Disorder that will sacrifice the jobs, fortunes, futures, and lives, of three hundred million Americans, in slavish homage to the myth that burning "fossil fuels" is causing climate change, and that by reducing our "carbon footprint" we can end climate change. Nothing is further from the truth. The climate has been changing as long as there has been a climate, long before we could have had anything to do with it.
How we ended up with a majority in Congress, and two presidential candidates, who are so appallingly ignorant of the basics of climatology, climate history, and the ubiquity of climate change, after this debate has already been raging for years, is a complete mystery to me. It is, in my opinion, Congressional malpractice, the wilful or negligent failure of most members of Congress to become well informed about the real science and history of climate change and what the effect, if any, of CO2 on the global climate really is, or isn't, before making legislative decisions that profoundly affect the lives of 300 million Americans. And I wonder, Can we sue Congress, for Congressional Malpractice?
Can we sue Congress for acting on false assumptions, when, by the exercise of reasonable care and due diligence, they could, and should, have become fully and honestly informed on the global warming and climate change issues, before making bad decisions that adversely affect the US economy, and the lives of every one of their constituents? Don't they have that duty? And haven't they breached it? And aren't we paying for it?
There is only one way to rescue America from the rising cost of energy that threatens to overwhelm the US economy. And that is to produce more energy. As soon as possible. In America.
We don't have time to wait for pie-in-the-sky fantasies, such as cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass. A little arithmetic tells us that to replace oil with switchgrass, which according to National Geographic can produce "up to" 1,000 gallons of ethanol per acre, per year, we'd have to produce a billion gallons a day, to replace the gasoline and diesel we consume. That's 365 billion gallons a year, plus another 15% to provide the energy to produce all that cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass, for a total of 420 billion gallons a year. This would require 420 cellulosic ethanol plants producing a billion gallons a year, each, and so far, we don't have one.
Not, not one producer of cellulosic ethanol on a commercial scale. And it would require 420 million acres of switchgrass farms, which would be a 150% increase in American farmland. And would not the adverse environmental impact of converting 420 million acres of wildlife habitat to switchgrass farms be enormous? Where are the Greens now? Why isn't the Sierra Club demanding an Environmental Impact Report?
Congress needs to come to grips with the fact that there is no credible evidence that CO2 causes "global warming." It has been warmer in the past, when CO2 was lower than now, and the temperature dropped 0.7 degrees last year, while CO2 was rising. But CO2 is plant food, fertilizer, plants suck it up and grow, and more CO2 in the air means plants grow faster, and need less water. With a growing world population facing chronic food shortages, we need more CO2 in the air to produce more food, not less.
And this means the misguided, misbegotten, delusional era of Greenism has to end. Soon. Now. The delusions of the radical environmentalists have taken us down this dangerous road, and the chickens are coming home to roost. And the chickens are very expensive. Having quarantined 90% of Federal lands from energy exploration and development, and blocked construction of nuclear power, and fuel refineries, it is the environmentalist policies, the Green policies, the Greenism, of the last generation that has put American in the spot it's in, and America can only get out of the spot by rejecting the delusional Greenism of the past, and embracing a rational energy policy for the future.
I'm with Barack Obama. I want "change." But maybe not the same change Barack Obama wants.
Here's the change I want.
1. Legislation to immediately lift all moratoria on oil and natural gas exploration and development on Federal lands, except National Parks.
2. Legislation to grant a 100% tax credit for all new capital investment in energy production in the US and its territorial waters. If you spent $20,000 to put solar panels on your roof, you get a $20,000 tax credit. If Exxon puts $75 billion into developing new oil production in the US, Exxon gets a $75 billion tax credit. This would "send a message" to OPEC that the party's just about over, and it would create millions of new jobs for working class Americans in America.
3. Legislation to fast-track NRC-approved nuclear power plant designs, and to require Green plaintiffs suing to block the construction of nuclear power plants, geothermal plants, oil refineries, or any other energy project, to prove by "clear and convincing evidence" that the proposed project was unreasonably dangerous, or that the harm it would cause was greater than the benefit it would confer.
Barack Obama said recently that he will deliver "$150 billion over the next ten years" to develop alternative energy. That's way too little, way too late. America needs it now, not ten years from now. We don't need to pass it through the government skim machine.
And Barry Boy is clueless. By granting a 100% tax credit for new capital investment in energy in the United States, we unleash the magnificent ingenuity of the American people, who will pump $150 billion into energy development in one year, not ten, and produce ten times, or a hundred times, as much new energy in ten years as any government-managed program ever could.
That's change.
And that's the end of Greenism.
Raymond S. Kraft is an attorney and writer in Northern California. He can be reached at rskraft@vfr.net
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 16 June 2008