Incoherent Energy Policy

An important study released by Congressional research service received little attention and showed the United States has the highest levels of fossil fuels combined with recoverable oil and natural gas in the world; more than double of Saudi Arabia. As one pundit recently wrote, “We have the most available energy sources and least coherent energy policy.”

The problem with our energy strategy is that we are held captive by radical environmentalist theories. As long as we view the world one degree away from total meltdown into global frying, then we will not design a sensible energy policy.

One would assume that after Climategate, in which key advocates of manmade climate change who thought the world was going to end, were caught manipulating data that one would be more skeptical of the Al Gores of the world. Yet, we still act as if the science is settle at a time that the science of climate change is rapidly collapsing like a soufflé slowly ebbing out. Here are the facts. The science of climate change is unsettled with the so-called climate change skeptics winning the scientific debate, and the United States is sitting upon wealth of energy that make not only the United States energy independent but gives us leg up in the 21st century when it comes to having the raw materials to drive economic growth. European studies show that subsidizing “green technologies” will raise energy prices and reduce jobs; one study even showed that for every job created by “green technologies,” four jobs were lost. Hardly a fair trade off, but that is where our energy policy is driving us to. (Obama's mantra is drill baby drill provided that drilling is done in Brazil; the war on fossil fuels has led to a policy where our own resources sit in the ground undeveloped.)

The real obstacle is do we have the will to develop the resources available to us? Right now, a sound energy policy has been thwarted by a scientific theory of manmade climate change that is sorely in need of facts to sustain it. Until we cease to weaken our economic growth by unsound energy policies and even less sound science, then our resources will go undeveloped, and we become poorer as a result.