American Elephants

The situation in the Gulf of Mexico has not improved. The actions of the administration continue to drive despair throughout the Gulf region. One excuse follows another.

A new report from the House Oversight Committee says that if President Obama is suffering politically from the backlash about high energy prices, he has only himself to blame. Committee Chairman Darrell Issa issued a blistering report on Monday, accusing the White House of deliberately pursuing policies designed to make energy more expensive, manipulating costs to favor his own energy choices.

The report—”Rising Energy Costs: An Intentional Result of Government Action”— accuses the administration of restricting access to domestic energy sources, hindering “fracking” technology and hampering the economic recovery by proposing new taxes on the energy industry.

The report also says the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) coordinated with environmental groups to target energy producers with environmental concerns. The Oversight Committee obtained an email between the EPA Texas regional director and an environmental advocate congratulating each other on progress in creating barriers to energy production from fossil fuel sources.

Obama has a history of pushing alternative energy sources.  In quotes from the president’s 2008 campaign, he said “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Coal-powered plants, you know natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money.”

Steven Chu, Secretary of the Department of Energy, said “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” In his fiscal year 2012 budget, Obama requested that the tax breaks for the oil industry be repealed, totaling $60 billion over 10 years. Jack Lew, director of the OMB, defended the repeals by tying them to the goal of producing more electric cars.

Enormous costs have been imposed on the American economy in the name of fraudulent ideas about ‘global warming.’ The Environmental Protection Agency has announced that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the public’s health and welfare.  Alan Carlin, PhD, a senior research analyst at the EPA did the reasonable thing, and applied the scientific method used in the EPA’s technical support document.  He found computerized guesswork, editing by advocates. Carlin was told to not communicate with anyone, and no meetings, no emails, no written statements, no phone calls. That was two years ago.

Carlin’s report has been updated, expanded, peer-reviewed and published in the respected International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The report scorns computer modelling, false comparisons between hypotheses and observed data, and efforts to manipulate climate measurements. The main points are that the economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions are vastly lower than EPA estimates, and the costs are vastly higher. His conclusion: the risk of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming appears to be so low that it is not worth doing anything to attempt to control it.

It’s not just high gas prices, nor unemployment and despair in the Gulf region, but  huge subsidies for unreliable and inefficient wind energy and solar energy. The government is choosing private businesses to support with taxpayer money that make expensive and unreliable electric cars; spending vast amounts of taxpayer money to support wind farms.; forcing car companies to make the kind of vehicles that the administration wants in spite of a complete lack of demand in the free market.

They are pushing high-speed rail on states that don’t want it; giving taxpayer money to a company that makes hugely expensive (but cute) electric sports cars. The president has ordered the federal vehicle fleet to be made up entirely of alternative-fuel automobiles by 2015. The cost of this policy will be astronomical compared to any environmental benefit, if there is any. He has ordered the government to buy more than 100 plug-in electric vehicles and will install charging stations in government buildings in five cities, including Detroit.  These are luxury $40,000 sedans, plus $2,500 charging stations bought for government employees. I could go on, and on.

All these billions of dollars are being wasted in an effort to prevent any increase in CO2, a benign colorless, odorless gas that is one of the building blocks of life. It is not only not a pollutant, but it is absolutely necessary for life on earth.  It is not a cause of global warming, for increases in CO2 in the atmosphere come after increases in temperature by as much as 300 years, and cannot be causative.

The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was created to bring about, in the words of Jacques Chirac, authentic global governance.  Preferably under the auspices of the United Nations, and the NGOs, the aspiring Non-Governmental Organizations. If that’s what all this chaos is about, it’s a flop on that accord.  The IPCC has been thoroughly discredited, and is turning their attention to biological diversity or something like that.

Do read the brief executive summary in the Oversight Committee Report.  The United States has the world’s greatest supply of energy. The President of the United States wants to keep us from using it.