American Elephants

Uh oh. “Congressional leaders including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi have privately sought as much as $30 million combined from Obama for America and the Democratic National Committee — a replay of the financial help they received from Obama in 2008 and 2010.”

Jim Messina and David Plouffe told Reid and Pelosi that there would be no cash transfer to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, at least not before election day. That’s the harsh reality. their top priority is to get the president reelected.

Obama seldom has anything on his schedule these days that is not some kind of campaign event. That’s why he has all those Czars — they do the work, then give the president a summary with three choices, he checks the box he wants. Easy.

Today he was in North Carolina at a truck manufacturing plant touting his “energy policy,” a fascinating fable of all the important things he is doing to keep the price of gas down. “Every year,” he said, about this time, gas starts spiking up, and everybody starts wondering, how high is it going to go?”  There are no quick fixes, he said.  “As a country that has 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, but uses 20 percent of the world’s oil— I’m going to repeat that — we’ve got 2 percent of the world’s reserves, we use 20 percent.” That is an out-and-out falsehood. The world has changed. We have more oil than Saudi Arabia, and a bountiful supply of energy.

The implication with that particular phrasing, is that we have hardly any oil, but we unfairly and selfishly take 20 percent of the world supply. No, we buy what foreign oil we use, at world prices. We use it because our economy is bigger and more dynamic and more productive than any other, and we provide goods and services and food for the world.  We have an estimated 1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to fuel the present needs of the U.S. for around 250 years. Obama’s “energy policy” has put most of this out of reach.

Obama’s latest is a $14 million grant for making fuel out of algae. The idea has been around for years, and gone nowhere because while producing a small amount of fuel from a small amount of algae is quite possible, scaling it up to useful amounts is another thing entirely. The U.S. consumes about 140 billion gallons per year of motor gasoline. If you assume that algae can produce 3,000 gallons of liquid fuel per acre in a year, it would take around 45 million acres of algae to provide 100% of our motor gasoline requirements, or about the size of the entire state of North Dakota. Obama is suggesting replacing 17% of our needs, which would take land about the size of South Carolina. DOE is currently subsidizing more than 30 algae-based biofuel projects at $85 million in total spending.

President Obama wants to begin construction on at least four commercial-scale refineries for biofuels by 2013.  The president will lavish funds on renewable sources of energy, work on better car batteries and a new nuclear plant rather than lifting a finger to increase domestic oil production. The president has control over drilling permits on federal lands.He has leased less federal lands to drilling than any other president.

When President George W. Bush lifted the executive moratorium on offshore oil drilling on July 14, 2008, oil prices dropped on world markets by $9.26 per barrel — or 22¢ per gallon.

Obama came into office promising “cap-and-trade,” one of the Left’s schemes for bringing down the American economy, but that was exposed and roundly rejected. So he’s trying to accomplish that by other means.  What he can’t get through Congress, he plans to get with regulation, executive order and the help of the EPA. The ideal is for Americans to live in dense cities, move about by public transportation, return the rest of the land to wilderness. This will give the rest of the world a chance to catch up, so we will all be more equal. Social and environmental justice. The latest iteration is “renewable energy mandates”

President Obama’s energy policy: bet on a clean energy economy.  Bad bet. In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama called for a “renewable portfolio standard” for the entire country — 80 percent to come from clean energy by 2035. Is it possible that so many are so completely clueless, and have so little understanding of the country? The potential damage is breathtaking.