Moloney's World: Sense and nonsense on energy

Editor: Our columnist Bill Moloney is more influential than we dreamed. In this piece, written a week ago for Bob Beauprez's website, he took McCain to school on offshore drilling among other issues. Within days the GOP nominee had pivoted and was endorsing, that's right, offshore drilling. Here is the Moloney piece. ==============================

The 18th century lexicographer Samuel Johnson famously remarked that the prospect of being hanged in the morning “concentrates the mind wonderfully”. Gasoline at $4.00 a gallon should be a similar spur to clear thinking about U.S. energy policy.

This however is not anywhere the case. Listening to Obama vs. McCain on energy sounds eerily like Carter vs. Ford in 1976.

Similarly clueless is the Congress where “new ideas” consist of jacking up the insane ethanol subsidy or the equally deranged impulse to impose a “windfall profits” tax on these “greedy” oil corporations.

Meanwhile President Bush is begging our “great ally” Saudi Arabia for a little discount oil. The Saudis-contemptuously- didn’t even wait for Bush to get home before delivering a resounding “No” and giving him a patronizing lecture on market economics, to boot.

So what explains this world class obtuseness regarding energy?

The reason lies in a thoroughly bi-partisan “conspiracy” to impose on our people a “Myth Agreed Upon”, i.e. that certain energy options are so inherently wicked that they cannot even be seriously discussed much less done.

Senator Harry Reid recently gave a speech entitled “America Needs More Oil”. Despite this breath-taking insight he was unable to articulate the obvious solution to the problem he had so cleverly identified: Immediately authorize a rapid expansion of off-shore drilling and the building of new refineries to accommodate the resulting immense increase in new petroleum.

Do this and gas prices will plummet and the stock market will surge tow roping the entire U. S. economy in a dramatic upswing.

This, won’t happen because thirty years ago a nasty oil spill off Santa Barbara led to a chain reaction of environmental scare-mongering- images of little children swimming in black sludge and the imminent death of all the pretty little sea birds- that resulted in California banning all new offshore drilling anywhere within the 200 mile limit- a colossally dumb policy move that nonetheless was imitated by virtually every other state with a shoreline.

Politicians of both parties still slavishly defend the wisdom, and “environmental sensitivity” of these decisions which retrospectively constitute one of the greatest self-inflicted wounds in U.S. history. Mindlessly they do so while willfully ignoring the following facts:

A- 460 % increase in gas prices;

B- extraordinary advances in off-shore drilling technology ;

C- Norway and other nations routinely and safely extract large quantities of undersea oil;

D- Before long Florida boaters will be able to wave to Chinese technicians zealously sucking up “black gold” within Cuban territorial waters almost within sight of Miami; and

E -most astoundingly- despite gushers of political rhetoric damning the “tyranny of our dependence on foreign oil”, and rivers of crocodile tears shed on behalf of the “poor American consumer” we continue to do business with people who don’t like us, overcharge us, sponsor terrorism against us and cause us to utterly warp the economic and political landscape of our nation through periodic and hugely counterproductive military adventures in the Middle East.

The flipside of the great energy myth is the near unshakeable taboo against nuclear power. Here the unspeakable but unanswerable question is : How come France can get nearly 40% of their total energy needs from nuclear plants- the cleanest and cheapest power source in history- and nobody bats an eye, but even hint at such an option for the U.S. and you are accused of wanting everybody’s children to glow in the dark. Getting a constitutional amendment raising the voting age to thirty would be easy compared to getting a permit for a new nuclear power plant.

Having ruled out the only two intelligent options liberals promote inane discussions about wind, solar, hybrids, ethanol, tripling the gasoline tax, trading in our SUVs for bicycles, and other economically laughable schemes.

Simple-minded environmentalism has entered into an unholy alliance with the junk science called “global warming” and morphed into a new secular religion for liberals. The old Red Menace of hare-brained Marxism has been replaced by the new Green Menace of crack-brained planet worship. Anyone doubting this didn’t hear the most interesting line in Obama’s speech claiming the Democratic nomination: “and the oceans shall recede, and the Planet shall begin to heal”.

At last, really new thinking on energy policy from St. Barack, High Priest of the earth goddess GAIA!

Anyone still doubt there’s a lot at stake next November 4th?

Green Left seduces the Rockefellers

Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, John D. Rockefeller’s corporate progeny, shrugged off greenie attacks by the Rockefeller heirs and fired back. Here's the latest from Canada. There are two things Coloradans should keep in mind about this developing story: 1) Unlike CEO James Mulva of our soon-to-be-neighbor in Broomfield, ConocoPhillips, Tillerson and Exxon Mobil haven’t knuckled under to the global warming hysteria (fraud and hoax are other words that come to mind) that’s all the rage these days.

2) Through the work of “climate czarina” Heidi VanGenderen and others, Gov. Ritter has Colorado in the grip of the same Rockefeller crowd who are nipping at Tillerson’s posterior at Exxon Mobil.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund supports an outfit called the Center for Climate Strategies , CCS, which I understand to be, among other things, a self-styled manager/facilitator (puppeteer?) seductively providing resources at no charge mainly to states to “[enable] deliberative democracy” in policy development addressing climate change. However, it appears the only climate change of interest to CCS is anthropogenic global warming (if any), and CCS’s skillful control of agendas leads in only one direction: drastically reduced carbon emissions. Some deliberative democracy (the term used in its mission statement).

In Colorado’s case, a climate action plan was reportedly developed with CCS guidance by another nonprofit, something called the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, RMCO. State climate (read, global warming) action plans engineered by CCS are usually the product of a “Climate Change Advisory Council” (do a Web search on that term, and you’ll see what I mean) appointed directly or indirectly by the governor; the RMCO work might be seen as more “independent,” but I believe that’s a distinction with little difference. A report in the Rocky 11/6/07 seems to confirm what I have learned from other sources, that the Ritter/VanGenderen climate action plan is the RMCO product with some minor variations.

Ominously, RMCO is hand-in-hand with the Natural Resources Defense Council. A major report on warming in the west featured on RMCO’s Website is shown to be the product of both organizations. A recent George Will column noted, “Today's ‘green left’ is the old ‘red left’ revised.” It would be hard to find an organization closer to the heart of the green left for the past 35 years than the NRDC.

Investor’s Business Daily had it right in this 5/29 editorial about Exxon Mobil in contrast to British Petroleum -- and one could add ConocoPhillips, Xcel and dozens of others that have drunk Al Gore’s koolaid. IBD’s comment about the endless ads “touting capitulation to the global warming religion” reminds me of Xcel’s ad about the Coors Field solar array and its Gee Whiz! 14,000 KWH per year. By comparison, the Palo Verde nuclear plant west of Phoenix generates 14,000 KWH in about 13 seconds.

Might one be unduly cynical to suggest that political correctness is the only thing standing between Xcel and nuclear-electric power advocacy?

Hillary mouthing Marxist myths

Hillary Clinton keeps advocating a “gas tax holiday” paid for by “big oil companies” out of their “record profits." Excuse me, Senator, but you have it all wrong in saying we need to "take on" those companies. The nation’s problem is not Big Oil and its alleged record profits, but lack of supply. But when you have outfits like the Sierra Club opposing any kind of drilling at the top of their lungs and with huge propaganda budgets, we wind up with a policy of NDAAAT or "Endat" -- No Drilling Anywhere At Any Time. More supply would bring down profits and prices as a matter of course, but the progressives will have none of it.

But let's look at the root belief behind Clinton's self-defeating policy recommendations. The left-wing progressives have what can only be considered an “agrarian view” of wealth. Like farmland, as they see it, wealth is fixed and indestructible. The crops grow and produce income, which also is fixed, and can be taken for granted. Therefore, the grand task is to redistribute the income and “eliminate poverty." What person of good will would not want to confiscate the farm land from the greedy parasitic land owners who do nothing but ride around in their carriages and cane their tenant farmers?

Trouble is, this was not even a good theory when it was formulated by Karl Marx in 1848; it certainly doesn’t fit an information age economy of the 21st Century.

These days, free markets can create wealth that expands or contracts with confidence or lack of confidence. Take Microsoft for example. When Bill Gates took Microsoft public, his founders stock suddenly made him a wealthy man! But the progressives believe in the Labor Value Theory which states that all wealth is the product of someone’s labor (such as planting and harvesting the crops in the 1848 model). Therefore, profits and wealth can only be exploitation of someone else, and are therefore bad. Therefore, Bill Gates’s wealth is something he should be ashamed of.

This is of course utter nonsense. The wealth creation, jobs, and supporting industries created by Microsoft are a great source of well being for our society as a whole! But the progressives, stuck in the 1840’s, don’t get it! They would like to kill Bill Gates and confiscate his wealth and redistribute it.

Okay, say we do this. Bill Gates is arrested and shot, and the Government announces it will now confiscate every share of Microsoft! What happens to the market price for MSFT? It will go to zero! So the government now has all the outstanding shares of Microsoft, ( 1 or 2 billion?). It redistributes those to every citizen in the country. Now everyone has 10 shares of Microsoft, but they are worthless, good for only toilet paper! Microsoft and the jobs and supporting industries all collapse and the economy contracts! But you can count on the progressives to blame everyone but themselves for the economic malaise.

Too bad the Democrats have put up Marxist lawyers as candidates instead of those who understand how a modern economy works.