Your Energy Future Under the Democrats

By Larrey Anderson
American Thinker

The "energy plan" announced by the Democrats offers one thing: a significant slowdown of our economy for at least twenty years. Those who run both legislative branches of the congress, and the energy plans of both of their leading candidates for president clothe themselves in the mantle of righteousness. That the Republicans are allowing this to happen, right before our eyes, tells us much about the sad state of American politics.

From their official website, here is the summary paragraph (including the bad grammar) of the Democrat plan to solve the energy crisis:

We will create a cleaner, greener and stronger America by reducing our dependence on foreign oil, eliminating billions in subsidies for oil and gas companies and use the savings to provide consumer relief and develop energy alternatives, and investing in energy independent technology.

This is also the Democrat solution. Get it? The Democrat plan is the Democrat solution. In logic this is called petitio principii or "begging the question."

Ask yourself: which of the five components of the "plan" should happen first? "Reducing our dependence on foreign oil" is listed first. But it cannot happen first. In order to keep the economy moving ahead, some type of energy must replace foreign oil-and this energy must be tangible, readily available, and close to the market price of the energy it is replacing.

This is a crucial point and very few people seem to understand it. We cannot solve the energy crisis by talking about the creation of, say, hydrogen fuel cells for cars. We must have a fully functioning economy in the intervening thirty or forty years that it will take to "develop energy alternatives" like hydrogen fuel cells. In other words, the pressing question is not "What energy alternative will we be using in forty years?" The real question is: What energy alternative will we be using tomorrow that will allow us the economic prosperity to create future alternative energies much further down the road?

Presently, over eighty-five per cent of our energy comes from "fossil fuels." We use more than twenty million barrels of oil every day in this country. For the economy to expand and give us time to create alternative forms of energy we will need more, not less, moderately priced fossil fuels in the intervening years. Nowhere in the Democrat plan is there a strategy to provide this energy.

Make no mistake, we are entering an energy crisis. At five dollars a gallon a typical low-income family will spend nearly 20% of total income on gasoline each year. At ten dollars a gallon these people will not get to work -- especially in rural or suburban America where a car is an absolute must.

Where will the desperately needed and moderately priced energy come from? Most of the currently developed oil fields are in the hands of dictators, like Hugo Chavez and the Saudi Royal Family or in the hands of socialist governments, like Norway, Mexico, and Russia. They can afford to keep production low and prices high. Indeed, given their controlled economies, it makes absolute economic sense for them to do so. It is our job (not Saudi Arabia's) to develop new natural gas and oil resources to help stem rising energy costs.

The Democrat plan also calls for "eliminating billions in subsidies for oil and gas companies." (I could not discover when and how the federal government has provided "billions in subsides for oil and gas companies." I assume that this really means raising taxes on oil and gas companies.) How is this strategy going to provide one gallon of fuel for Americans? It certainly has not worked in the past when price controls and higher taxes have always led to long lines at the gas pumps.

The Democrats are playing a very dangerous game. If we do not have a viable, recession free, economy in the short and medium term, then we will not get to a "cleaner, greener and stronger America" in the long run. We will not be able to sustain short-term economic growth that leads to long-term technological development without moderately priced energies being available throughout the process.

Republicans, if they are truly interested in America's future, had better start to point out the obvious flaws in the Democrats' "plan." Time to start drilling.

Larrey Anderson is a philosopher and writer living in Idaho.

Dems and High Oil Prices

May 13, 2008
Patrick Casey
American Thinker

While oil and gasoline prices continue to rise, the rhetoric and actions of Democrats in Congress seem destined to push those costs even higher, contrary to the Dems' promise that they used to get elected to majorities in 2006 that they had "a common-sense plan to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices".

Investor's Business Daily has a continuing series on "Breaking the Back of High Oil", and today's edition has a fascinating breakdown of some of the actions that the Democrats have taken over the last three decades or so to ensure that our country has no defense against the effects of rising oil prices. While doing so, they've made us all captives of OPEC and such tinpot dictatorships such as Venezuela.

Today's editorial in the series, Who Is Really Responsible For The High Prices You Pay For Gasoline?, points out that we have attempted to get Congressional approval for drilling in Alaska's ANWR region for the last 28 years. Remember that the next time a Democrat brings up the "fact" that it will take 10 years to get ANWR on line - if President Clinton hadn't vetoed ANWR drilling the time that it evaded blocking maneuvers by Democrats and got through a Republican controlled Congress in the mid-90s, we'd be in the second or third year of active production from that oil field. Any such domestic drilling would have produced substantial downward pressure on international oil prices set by the cartels - so in addition to having our own new source of oil, prices we pay internationally today would have been cheaper.

Other actions during the past few decades that the Democrats (and a few stray Republicans) have taken to ensure that we have high energy prices include:
For the past 31 years, Congress repeatedly prevented us from building any new oil refineries that we now badly need.

More recently, congressional Democrats defeated and discouraged any bill that would let us drill in the deep sea 100 miles out. However, it's somehow OK for China to drill there.



As a further indictment of our Congress, since the 1980s it has continually stopped all building of nuclear power plants while France, Germany and, yes, Japan, plus 12 other major nations, did build plants and now get 20% to 80% of their energy from their wise and safe nuclear plant investments.

From 1990 to 2000, U.S. crude oil demand rapidly accelerated by 7.41 quadrillion BTUs, according to Department of Energy data. And our rate of foreign oil dependency dramatically increased while our domestic oil production steadily declined.



Under the eight Clinton years alone, U.S. oil production declined 1,349,000 barrels per day, or 19%, while our foreign imports increased 3,574,000 barrels per day, or 45%.

The offshore drilling debacle is particularly goading.
Cuba made a huge offshore discovery of oil in 2006, 50 miles or less off the coast of Florida. As it's in Cuban territory, that country has sold off blocks for development to Venezuela and China. Correctly assuming that the United States was best equipped to drill responsibly in that area (thus protecting Florida's coastline), Republicans in Congress introduced the "Western Hemisphere Energy Security Act of 2006", which would have allowed US companies to lease that land in Cuba's territorial waters. The bill was killed before hearings were even held on it.

With the enormous amount of information available to the public on Congress' actions (or inactions) on energy policy over the past 30 years, it should be easy to paint Democrats as the "owners" of high oil and gasoline prices.

As for alternative energy sources other than nuclear that everyone seems to be pushing, there's no guarantee that any of those will 1) be a viable large-scale substitute of energy derived from fossil fuels, and 2) result in cheaper energy. And remember the law of unintended consequences.

Ethanol was sold to the American public as a cleaner and cheaper alternative to gasoline. It is neither, and the demand for corn-based ethanol has had the added impact of increasing food costs worldwide.
As the IBD editorial states, "It's wake-up time for America. Maybe we should investigate the blame-throwing investigators in Congress."

I highly suggest that all readers check out the series "Breaking the Back of High Oil" on the IBD web site. Use the FACTS to write letters to the editor to educate and inform.

Call your Congressional reps and demand that they remove regulations that hinder drilling and the building of new refineries, such as Arizona Clean Fuels.


The demand for oil will only increase here and globally. We need to act NOW or be faced with ever increasing cost at the pump and at the grocery store.