The United States has the resources today to solve its own energy crisis.
It’s not energy we’re in short supply of, it’s vision in which we have a deficit.
We have no great leaders who can fill the American canvas with a picture of a positive future and then lead us there. Instead, we have the leadership of failure and diminished expectations, as if by design.
We are being told by the president that the future will be rationed, portioned off, each according to his needs with Big Birther watching over every aspect of production from healthcare to energy, from retirement to immigration enforcement- defining for us who gets to stay here and who does not, instead of letting the law decide.
We have a government of men, now, not laws.
See also Kudlow: A Reelection Jobs Report? and Kristof: New Health and Other Tax Deductions
In energy, the country enjoys reserves that could supply our needs for at least the next fifty years conservatively speaking, not counting shale oil and new deployment of nuclear energy. Domestic sources of energy in the US are super-abundant. In practically every energy technology, the US leads the way.
The rest of us want to use those energy resources; but one party, led by Obama, does not. They offer us only the leadership of failure and diminished expectations.
Since the 1970s, the far-left extremists of the party of “O” have waged a terror war on American energy that has led us to decreasing production of some types of domestic energy. As a result we are committed to a dangerous involvement in the Middle East and now North Africa to secure supplies for the West.
Recommended
Get John Ransom's daily market commentary at the Ticker
The party of “O” has prevented domestic oil production, coal mining, nuclear development and natural gas production, each of which combined, accounts for virtually all of our current energy supply.
At a time when energy demand is sharply rising, Big Birther is wagging a finger at us and telling us to drive less and keep our homes colder or foot a higher bill. It’s the same policy Democrats have been following for thirty years.
“I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can,” Jimmy Carter pleaded with the nation in 1979, “to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel... In the days to come, let us renew that strength in the struggle for an energy-secure nation.”
It was probably the ringing call to “obey the speed limit,” that lifted Carter’s approval rating to 37 percent after this speech.
Despite Obama’s recent promise to drill, baby, drill, the Democrat struggle for an energy-secure nation looks an awful lot like their war on Libya: An undeclared war, with undefined objectives and underwhelming leadership that seems ambivalent to victory.
Obama’s energy policy still rests upon developing new, illusory technologies and restricting demand, policies that amount to little else than energy rationing; policies pushed by UN globalists, extreme eco-groups and the green billionaires’ lobby. It’s the leadership of failure and diminished expectations.
By pretending that we can simply import less energy by using less of certain types of energy, Obama, however, gets to maintain the ideological unity of his party.
It doesn’t matter that those policies ignore what we know about human behavior, economics, the business cycle and basic shapes and colors.
Because in the crusade to save the world from America, Americans are just going to have to realize that they will need to make some sacrifices, simply as a matter of fairness to everyone else.
The original healthcare reform act passed by the country, the Volstead Act of 1919 –known as Prohibition- likewise failed to take into account human behavior.
It acted like a steroid for organized crime in the country, yet still persisted for thirteen years, because its proponents wagged their finger that prohibition was for the good of the country.
The energy reformists likewise wag their finger at us over global warming, acid rain, the Amazon rainforest, the ozone hole, energy security, saving the planet, saving the whales and 1000 other things that are for our own good.
But there are no unintended consequences of the energy policies that they pursue. They are only unstated consequences. For them, higher oil prices are wonderful, nuclear disaster rocks.
Because the failure of their energy policy has been a failure, not just of leadership.
Increasingly, the failures of the government decide what type of energy we use, who stays here in the US and who gets deported, who gets to retire at what age and who gets treated by national healthcare.
Taken as a whole, those are the failures of men, not laws. In short, they are failure by design.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member