A few questions for President Obama
How exactly does the President plan to create his new Green Jobs Economy?
Guest post by Paul Driessen
America needs decisive leaders who understand what government can (and cannot) do to stop the Gulf gusher, clean up the mess, and get business, jobs and prosperity back on track. Instead, President Obama sounds like an anti-business Community Organizer in Chief – pointing fingers, making baseless claims about ending our “addiction to oil,” and leaving no crisis unexploited to promote job-killing cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy agendas. His June 15 “vision” raised more questions than it answered.
1) The President said he can no longer support new drilling unless industry can prove it will be “absolutely safe.” This avoidable environmental disaster happened because BP, its contractors and MMS regulators did not follow procedures or respond properly to tests and warning signs, indicating critical trouble was brewing downhole. But if “absolute safety” is to decide activities and technologies, America will come to a standstill in the absence of impossible-to-obtain proof that nothing will ever go wrong, no one will ever screw up, and no technology will ever malfunction.
Oil tankers sometimes run aground, unleashing their black cargo on our shores. Will oil imports now be banned, as well? Over 42,000 Americans died in car accidents last year. Will highways and city streets be closed to vehicles? Airports, trains and subways? Wind turbines kill 3,000 eagles and other raptors every year, plus 100,000 to 300,000 other birds and bats. Will they be shut down until that carnage ends?
2) President Obama demanded that BP “set aside “whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed” by the spill. With thousands of environmental activists, regulators, congressmen and trial lawyers on Team Obama, one can only imagine what creative damages and costs might be concocted, to convert the initial $20-billion BP fund into a bottomless money pit, and what “standards” might guide bird death valuations, for example.
ExxonMobil paid $600,000 when 85 birds died in uncovered waste facilities. PacifiCorp paid was fined $1.4 million after 230 eagles were killed by its power lines over a two-year period. Will those fines set the standard for Gulf oil spill bird deaths? Or will the standard be the zero, zip, nada fines assessed to date on wind turbine operators for their ongoing slaughter? Will BP be required to compensate oil field workers who lose their jobs because Team Obama imposed an arbitrary drilling moratorium, instead of ensuring improved oversight of drilling, blowout prevention and well completion activities?
3) The President said China is creating “clean energy” jobs “that should be right here in America,” while we send “nearly $1 billion of our wealth every day to foreign countries for their oil.” We will “embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny,” he declared, because “the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.”
America is not running out of oil. It is running out of places the government allows us to drill. China is creating renewable energy jobs, because it mines the lanthanides, lithium and other minerals that are essential for wind turbines, solar panels and hybrid cars, while we lock up our prospects; burns coal to generate cheap electricity to run its factories, while the White House, Congress and EPA try to drive US coal-based power to extinction; and pays its factory workers a fraction of what American workers receive.
Companies have been drilling in deep waters, because most onshore and shallow water areas are off limits. Will we now open the ANWR, Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, Rockies and near-shore OCS to drilling – where access and development are easier, and accidents (that we hope, and industry must ensure, never happen again) can be fixed and cleaned up far more easily than in mile-deep waters?
Will President Obama lift his OCS moratorium (which even his independent safety experts opposed), before it further devastates the battered Gulf economy, rigs head overseas, and thousands of experienced workers permanently leave the industry for other lines of work?
To advance the President’s “national mission” and generate 20% or more of our electricity with wind and solar, will our legislators, regulators and litigators continue to ignore the environmental review, endangered species, migratory bird and other laws that govern fossil fuel and nuclear power – so that we can rapidly blanket millions of acres of onshore and offshore America with wind turbines and solar panels, to replace coal-fired power plants, regardless of the environmental costs?
Rather than dozens of “ugly” offshore oil and gas platforms, often dozens of miles from our coasts – will America now enjoy seeing thousands of “beautiful” offshore wind turbines, towering above our beaches and creating obstacle courses for submarines, merchant ships laden with bunker fuel, and more tankers filled with crude oil and far more toxic refined product?
Will the President and Congress now open some of the hundreds of millions of acres they have made off limits to exploration and mining for the minerals needed to manufacture “green” technologies here in America? Or will we henceforth be dependent on foreign countries and dictators for both our “dirty” oil and the raw materials and finished components needed to build a new “clean energy” economy?
4) Under a cap-tax-and-trade regime, the price of hydrocarbon energy will “necessarily skyrocket,” to “encourage” companies and families to use less fossil fuel energy, and “persuade” them to switch to wind and solar. How will that affect turbine and panel manufacturing costs and subsidies, and the downstream costs of renewable energy and everything Americans make, grow, drive, ship, eat, drink and do?
How will US wind and solar factories compete with Chinese and Indian facilities, if the American plants are compelled to pay two, three, five times as much for electricity, under cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy mandates? How will they compete if they must also pay subsidies, union wages and gold-plated health and pension plans, if government grants are also tied to compulsory unionization, and if non-union shops and right-to-work states are excluded from the bidding and subsidy process?
How will regulators and “clean energy” companies deal with the nasty pollutants generated in the process of manufacturing hundreds of thousands of wind turbines and millions of acres of solar panels? How will they handle highly toxic silicon tetrachloride, the powerful greenhouse gas nitrogen trifluoride and other chemicals used or generated in making solar panels, fiberglass and other components?
Even “little” 1.5 megawatt wind turbines require 700 tons of concrete, steel, fiberglass, copper and rare earth (lanthanide) minerals. Add in the transmission lines and backup gas-fired generators, and we’re talking some serious land use, raw material, pollution, bird kill and economic issues. How do our legislators, regulators, litigators and environmental activists plan to address these issues?
Will solar and wind companies operate under free market principles, to compete and possibly fail against other energy firms? Or will they be kept in business via huge subsidies under government systems that extract countless billions from families and less favored companies, borrow it from our children, and redistribute that wealth to “clean energy” companies? How long will this Grecian Formula be sustainable?
Spain lost 2.2 traditional jobs for every wind power job its massive subsidies created. President Obama has said we can create 5 million green jobs. How does he plan to compensate 11 million workers who will lose their traditional jobs under the Spanish Scenario? With more stimulus money and red ink?
Every seven million gallons of corn-based ethanol requires billions in subsidies, cropland equivalent to Indiana, millions of gallons of water and millions of tons of fertilizer, to make fuel that costs more but gets a third less mileage than gasoline. Can someone explain how this is eco-friendly and sustainable?
When this house of cards inevitably collapses, as it has in Spain, will its congressional and administration creators be held responsible and accountable, under the same standards they are applying to BP?
Just asking. (Not that I expect President Obama, Senator Kerry or Speaker Pelosi to have any answers – or even deign to respond to any American citizen who might ask such impertinent questions.)
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death.
A few questions for President Obama
How exactly does the President plan to create his new Green Jobs Economy?
Paul Driessen
America needs decisive leaders who understand what government can (and cannot) do to stop the Gulf gusher, clean up the mess, and get business, jobs and prosperity back on track. Instead, President Obama sounds like an anti-business Community Organizer in Chief – pointing fingers, making baseless claims about ending our “addiction to oil,” and leaving no crisis unexploited to promote job-killing cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy agendas. His June 15 “vision” raised more questions than it answered.
1) The President said he can no longer support new drilling unless industry can prove it will be “absolutely safe.” This avoidable environmental disaster happened because BP, its contractors and MMS regulators did not follow procedures or respond properly to tests and warning signs, indicating critical trouble was brewing downhole. But if “absolute safety” is to decide activities and technologies, America will come to a standstill in the absence of impossible-to-obtain proof that nothing will ever go wrong, no one will ever screw up, and no technology will ever malfunction.
Oil tankers sometimes run aground, unleashing their black cargo on our shores. Will oil imports now be banned, as well? Over 42,000 Americans died in car accidents last year. Will highways and city streets be closed to vehicles? Airports, trains and subways? Wind turbines kill 3,000 eagles and other raptors every year, plus 100,000 to 300,000 other birds and bats. Will they be shut down until that carnage ends?
2) President Obama demanded that BP “set aside “whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed” by the spill. With thousands of environmental activists, regulators, congressmen and trial lawyers on Team Obama, one can only imagine what creative damages and costs might be concocted, to convert the initial $20-billion BP fund into a bottomless money pit, and what “standards” might guide bird death valuations, for example.
ExxonMobil paid $600,000 when 85 birds died in uncovered waste facilities. PacifiCorp paid was fined $1.4 million after 230 eagles were killed by its power lines over a two-year period. Will those fines set the standard for Gulf oil spill bird deaths? Or will the standard be the zero, zip, nada fines assessed to date on wind turbine operators for their ongoing slaughter? Will BP be required to compensate oil field workers who lose their jobs because Team Obama imposed an arbitrary drilling moratorium, instead of ensuring improved oversight of drilling, blowout prevention and well completion activities?
3) The President said China is creating “clean energy” jobs “that should be right here in America,” while we send “nearly $1 billion of our wealth every day to foreign countries for their oil.” We will “embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny,” he declared, because “the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.”
America is not running out of oil. It is running out of places the government allows us to drill. China is creating renewable energy jobs, because it mines the lanthanides, lithium and other minerals that are essential for wind turbines, solar panels and hybrid cars, while we lock up our prospects; burns coal to generate cheap electricity to run its factories, while the White House, Congress and EPA try to drive US coal-based power to extinction; and pays its factory workers a fraction of what American workers receive.
Companies have been drilling in deep waters, because most onshore and shallow water areas are off limits. Will we now open the ANWR, Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, Rockies and near-shore OCS to drilling – where access and development are easier, and accidents (that we hope, and industry must ensure, never happen again) can be fixed and cleaned up far more easily than in mile-deep waters?
Will President Obama lift his OCS moratorium (which even his independent safety experts opposed), before it further devastates the battered Gulf economy, rigs head overseas, and thousands of experienced workers permanently leave the industry for other lines of work?
To advance the President’s “national mission” and generate 20% or more of our electricity with wind and solar, will our legislators, regulators and litigators continue to ignore the environmental review, endangered species, migratory bird and other laws that govern fossil fuel and nuclear power – so that we can rapidly blanket millions of acres of onshore and offshore America with wind turbines and solar panels, to replace coal-fired power plants, regardless of the environmental costs?
Rather than dozens of “ugly” offshore oil and gas platforms, often dozens of miles from our coasts – will America now enjoy seeing thousands of “beautiful” offshore wind turbines, towering above our beaches and creating obstacle courses for submarines, merchant ships laden with bunker fuel, and more tankers filled with crude oil and far more toxic refined product?
Will the President and Congress now open some of the hundreds of millions of acres they have made off limits to exploration and mining for the minerals needed to manufacture “green” technologies here in America? Or will we henceforth be dependent on foreign countries and dictators for both our “dirty” oil and the raw materials and finished components needed to build a new “clean energy” economy?
4) Under a cap-tax-and-trade regime, the price of hydrocarbon energy will “necessarily skyrocket,” to “encourage” companies and families to use less fossil fuel energy, and “persuade” them to switch to wind and solar. How will that affect turbine and panel manufacturing costs and subsidies, and the downstream costs of renewable energy and everything Americans make, grow, drive, ship, eat, drink and do?
How will US wind and solar factories compete with Chinese and Indian facilities, if the American plants are compelled to pay two, three, five times as much for electricity, under cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy mandates? How will they compete if they must also pay subsidies, union wages and gold-plated health and pension plans, if government grants are also tied to compulsory unionization, and if non-union shops and right-to-work states are excluded from the bidding and subsidy process?
How will regulators and “clean energy” companies deal with the nasty pollutants generated in the process of manufacturing hundreds of thousands of wind turbines and millions of acres of solar panels? How will they handle highly toxic silicon tetrachloride, the powerful greenhouse gas nitrogen trifluoride and other chemicals used or generated in making solar panels, fiberglass and other components?
Even “little” 1.5 megawatt wind turbines require 700 tons of concrete, steel, fiberglass, copper and rare earth (lanthanide) minerals. Add in the transmission lines and backup gas-fired generators, and we’re talking some serious land use, raw material, pollution, bird kill and economic issues. How do our legislators, regulators, litigators and environmental activists plan to address these issues?
Will solar and wind companies operate under free market principles, to compete and possibly fail against other energy firms? Or will they be kept in business via huge subsidies under government systems that extract countless billions from families and less favored companies, borrow it from our children, and redistribute that wealth to “clean energy” companies? How long will this Grecian Formula be sustainable?
Spain lost 2.2 traditional jobs for every wind power job its massive subsidies created. President Obama has said we can create 5 million green jobs. How does he plan to compensate 11 million workers who will lose their traditional jobs under the Spanish Scenario? With more stimulus money and red ink?
Every seven million gallons of corn-based ethanol requires billions in subsidies, cropland equivalent to Indiana, millions of gallons of water and millions of tons of fertilizer, to make fuel that costs more but gets a third less mileage than gasoline. Can someone explain how this is eco-friendly and sustainable?
When this house of cards inevitably collapses, as it has in Spain, will its congressional and administration creators be held responsible and accountable, under the same standards they are applying to BP?
Just asking. (Not that I expect President Obama, Senator Kerry or Speaker Pelosi to have any answers – or even deign to respond to any American citizen who might ask such impertinent questions.)
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death.
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America and the world is not running out of oil. It is being replenished. Old see-saw wells in Pennsylvania are pumping again (still).
It is not fossil fuel, it is abiogenic. Don’t listen to the oil companies and OPEC – they want the price high; if they can get everyone to believe it is a supply problem then the price stays up.
Everything they taught you in government schools is rubbish. DDT, ozone, acid rain, Y2K, H1N1, need I go on?
We should do what Henry Ford wanted to do, run our vehicles on alcohol. While corn is not very efficient, there are many other plants with much more bang for the buck.
Agave being one such plant.
What we really need to loose our dependence on is Big Banks. They make all the decisions about what gets funded and have complete control over our money system. Read, “Web of Debt” by Ellen Hodgson Brown.
The problem with Big Oil is not oil as a resource, but Oil as a control mechanism since it has to be purchased with Federal Reserve Notes- and those are created (completely out of thin air) by the Big Banks private club, the Federal Reserve.
Troels Halken says:
June 23, 2010 at 4:14 pm
“That is BS. The US is long past peak discovery and peak oil.”
That’s the problem with many people. Troels, you’d be correct if our discovery technology hadn’t advanced in the last century. Odd, though, it did. In fact, we recently found a few billions of barrels right here in the lower 48. Here’s one place, http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911 . Fact is, every year we find more. And every year we import more because we’re not allowed to recover the oil. What I’d like to know, if the people are so convinced we are about out and we need to move to a different source of energy, why do they care if we suck the last few drops out of the ground? We’re about to run out anyway and move to a different form. So, what’s the problem? Is mining copper preferable to drilling oil? Bauxite? Of course it’s a toss up with coal. What’s the damned difference?
It should be stated, that even if we’re to start to allow drilling in new areas of the country, it wouldn’t make much difference at the pump. This country operates at almost peak refining capacity. We haven’t been allowed to build one since the ’70s. Weird too, we have only one nuclear plant coming online in the next couple of years and I don’t believe there is anymore planned. Jobs, cheap and reliable energy, economies, energy independence…bah, who needs them?
“bubbagyro says:
[…]
He shrugged in the French way and pointed to the babe in the passenger seat and shrugged again. Now I knew the reason for “voila la difference”.”
The French are a pragmatic lot 😉
Be nice to Murray,guys/gals. I think he may be just having a little snit because Paul pointed out,or rather asked,all the right questions that explains why his(Murray’s) stock options with T.Boone Pickens are now worth less then toilet paper.
But then again,he should have known better then to trust a billionaire OIL tycoon!!
After reading the MMS data that was sent to Congress before the hearings … Massive regulatory failure … What the American people thought was supposed to be happening was not. The regulations were all there, just not followed.
1. MMS approved a substandard well design, single wall casing, which limited safety options.
2. During the weeks following Feb 10, 2010 BP notified MMS of a well control situation. It took three tries to finally bring the well under control. Leaking gas was the culprit. This was the first red flag, which should have shut the drilling of this well down.
3. MMS approved every drilling move BP made, before they did the procedure..
4. MMS waived the environmental and cleanup requirements. Which proved fatal.
5. No federal agency had the first line of defense equipment on hand at the time of the blowout, fire booms, and only one was available in the USA. This is required by the 1990 OPA. The manufacturer can build only about 5000 feet a month of the fire booms.
6. The EPA plan calls for containing the oil well blowout at the well head and at all costs not allowing the oil to reach shore…. Well the oil is at least contained in the Gulf, for now.
Need more, the WSJ has a lot of the big stuff in their articles.
Well contrast Obama’s approach to National Leadership to that of President Kennedy who gave Americans a challenge that they rose to.
And all this apology for a leader can do, is get himself and his peons in the way. What was it about Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
This one goes and plays golf instead.
This country is a sorry shadow of the place I set out for 49 years ago, and it is going down fast; led by the killing of the Golden Goose that was California.
Hey if I wanted to live in a third world country I would pick one myself and move there; there’s no need to turn America into one, to satisfy whatever burr Obama has under his saddle.
If you can’t lead; at least get out of the way of those that have places to go, and things to do.
“”” Troels Halken says:
June 23, 2010 at 4:14 pm
“America is not running out of oil. It is running out of places the government allows us to drill.”
That is BS. The US is long past peak discovery and peak oil.
This is a policy piece and I did not read any further because his data is obviously as twisted as Michael Mann’s…. “””
Are you suggesting that the USA is already fully utilising, all the known oil deposits that we have discovered on our soil orunder our part of the oceans. I find such a claim to be laughable. We have huge known deposits that the Government has simply put off limits to never be developed; same goes for coal and natural gas.
If we are already past the best of the petroleum era; and so far we haven’t had any massive climate meltdown or runaway thermal events; then what possible harm could come from at least usingthat which we have left that we know about while we are discovering this green energy of our Utopian future.
If we had only consumed 1% of the resource, and decided it was too polluting to continue; that would be a different story.
Jumping 10 feet across a 12 foot wide chasm; is not exactly a winning strategy; when you had the means to go 12 feet and elected to not use it.
“”” Murray says:
June 23, 2010 at 2:16 pm
Is this really the forum for ill informed political screeds? If yes, you have just lost a faithful reader and sometime commentator. I find this whole posting offensive and misplaced. “””
If you haven’t noticed yet; that this is a multidiciplinary blog; not restricted to just the climate science of atmospheric carbon dioxide; then perhasp you aren’t as faithful a reader as you claim.
Well you know where the light switch is; and presumably how to use it; go for it !
This one has been doing the rounds at work, so apologies if it has been posted before, but I think it sums up the last two months for BP very well:
Enjoy!
Unfortunately, while we may choose, though at our own peril, to ignore politics, politics is seldom willing to ignore us. As with everything else government has taken over, politicians make decisions based on politics. Remember that even good beancounters are still just beancounters. Many seem to have the sole goal of controlling the rest of us–for our own good, of course. To them, results don’t matter, only their intentions of doing good. Run in fear when you hear: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Bulldust says:
June 23, 2010 at 5:27 pm
I hadn’t seen that one! Funny stuff!
“3) The President said China is creating “clean energy” jobs “that should be right here in America,” while we send “nearly $1 billion of our wealth every day to foreign countries for their oil.”
Yeh, ’cause we’d rather send our money to China as opposed to other places! I wish that pinhead would figure out who’s making those damned windmills for us. I’d almost be for those silly things if we’d insist on the materials used and fabrication would be done and from the states, but they’re not and as consequence, they are of negative value for this country.
@Murray Sandland says:
June 23, 2010 at 2:16 pm
“…Is this really the forum for ill informed political screeds? If yes, you have just lost a faithful reader and sometime commentator. I find this whole posting offensive and misplaced….”
First, I don’t recall seeing your comments at any time (the name Murray rings a bell, ‘cuz it’s my son’s middle name). Second, why don’t you tell us how ill-informed this screed is , so we have some way to judge it relative to your obviously high standards. [snip]
They should call Green Energy what it most accomplishes: Perpetual Motion.
Expending more energy and money to support a machine that produces a fraction of what is input.
The throughput of these schemes is loss.
Team Fed today went and shut down the Louisiana barrier island project. Told them they don’t have enough permits.
What nice people.
Makes me wonder whose side they are on. An undersea robot ran into the top hat and it had to be shut off, so the sawn-off well leak is unabated and free-flowing now.
We need a new Mann Act. One that prohibits paleoclimatologists from enslaving humanity.
You know, I do expect a higher level of comments from WUWT readers than we are getting to this post. There are a lot of exaggerations and generalizations with the original post, and it is kind of a political screed. For instance, regarding ethanol, it does not take acreage the size of Indiana to make 7 million gallons, and it doesn’t take billions in subsidies. There are 36000 sq miles of land area in Indiana, equal to about 23 million acres. With a conservative yield of 100 gallons of ethanol per acre, that’s about 2.3 billion gallons of ethanol from Indiana size acreage. I am not crazy about ethanol and it’s subsidies, but what is the economic multiplier from keeping that money here, as opposed to sending it overseas for foreign oil. And who does that money go to? A lot of it goes to Venezuela, where it supports a communist dictator, Saudi Arabia where large amounts end up funding terrorists, and to the corruption in Nigeria, where the pollution in the Niger Delta continually resembles what we are seeing in the Gulf now. And don’t even think about the military money we are spending to try to keep the middle east stable. (and that may not work)
And corn ethanol, with its’ negative properties, is not where the target is anyway. Study carefully what the biofuel developers are doing, and you will see that there is a path to biofuels that makes a lot of sense for the US. Cellulosic sources and algaes are quickly coming down in price, and dwarf the yields of corn, soybean, and sugar cane.
Are there some hare-brained approaches in the federal programs? You bet there are, because our system rewards those that are well connected, not necessarily the best ideas. But don’t let that keep us from doing the things that make sense. And don’t be stampeded by people screaming that it can’t possibly be done. Look at it for your selves. The US has the capacity to overcome all of the obstacles to reach a better place for us and our children.
I posted this in the wrong place:
Sorry if you read this, but this should be required reading for every scientist:
I thought this might be a good place for this gem from Pres. D. Eisenhower’s farewell address (Dartmouth, 1953). He was a forward thinking man who is the most prescient and under-appreciated of all the presidents, IMHO:
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present
— and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Chillzzz!
Barry has run up the debt to such a level that your generation and mine cannot pay our share. I’m a boomer – one of the first. Not because of anything I’ve done, I owe my grandkids a lot of money I can’t pay back as there are not enough years left to me to do so.
Kids – I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would turn out this way.
Goo job Paul Driessen isn’t in the military otherwise Obama would have sacked him!
James Sexton says: “…And the sun only shines half the day…”
You are doing well if you can get 8 hours a day of sunlight, after allowance for solar-to-array angles, surrounding structures, seasonal variation in sunrise/sunset, etc.
Is this why the Obama administration is continuing to seek to stop all drilling?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100006618/peak-oil-postponed-again/
Ok, for some of you guys complaining about the “absolute safety” thing, what would you say? You cannot say anything politically besides “we will ensure they are absolutely safe before we ever drill again.” It has to be said that way for the public and the media. Do you guys honestly think any person in the government actually intends to follow through with those words? No. It simply can’t be done–but they have to appease the people. He’s a lawyer, he went to Harvard, he knows this. I’m sure Obama will be sensible about it like an adult but will merely portray this image of being extrememly hard about it. You can’t take statements like this at face value. It’s like when a company screws up and the CEO tells people that they are taking measures to ensure that it never ever happens ever again, ever.
Driessen is absolutely spot on. One of the best posts I’ve read for some time (and there has been VERY stiff opposition because the standard of the postings on WUWT never fails to amaze me. Thanks, Anthony and the moderators!)
I don’t know the technical details of biolfuels but I do know that they do absolutely zilch to lower emissions, far less to control the climate, they do make some farmers very rich but they also make the poor of the world pay even more for their food. And the stuff just isn’t as good as normal diesel.
There are ample energy reserves in North America just there to be exploited. Natural gas can grow exponentially, especially thanks to the fairly new technologies of extracting coal bed methane, underground gassification of coal reserves and extraction of gas from shale beds. That plus nuclear is more than enough to keep the US economy running smoothly. Oil and mined coal is there in abundance whilst the infrastructure develops.
Just think, endless cheap, reliable energy. The energy that made America great. Energy that can be developed without a cent of subsidy and there are companies raring to go – if you can wrest political control back from the “renewable energy” eco-freaks and subsidy junkies.
Set your environmental regulators to control and to prevent real pollution and leave harmless trace gas CO2 alone!
Absolutely nothing is without risk. Even if you cower under your eiderdown in bed, the chimney pot may come crashing down.
But risk can be minimised. And exploiting oil sands, for example, is just a tad less risky than drilling in a mile depth of sea!
But the biggest risk we face, without a doubt, is to let the incompetent and corrupt politicians in the US and in Europe try to solve a non existent problem by trying to base our economies on “clean” energy that is absolutely unaffordable and simply doesn’t work.