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o listen to Nancy Pelosi, the GOP is fixated on drilling and drilling only, while the Dems want a healthy smörgåsbord (oxymoron alert!) of energy options. I’ll translate: She’s fabricating the GOP policy and the Dem smörgåsbord is all kinds of oil, as long as it’s grossly over-regulated and negatively incentivized, and all kinds of alternative fuels – except nuclear – as long as they have zero environmental impact and don’t raise the price of arugula.

For all the hoopla on wind – which overlooks the Dem constituencies that fight wind installations – it will never be ready for prime time, says Dr. Robert Zubrin of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies:

Simply to replace the 18% of our natural gas we currently import would require multiplying the nation’s current total wind power tenfold; to free up enough domestic natural gas to replace half our gasoline would require a thirty-fold wind power increase. The feasibility of doing this is very doubtful, not merely because of the size of the project but because wind power is intrinsically unreliable. When the wind speed drops in half, power output drops by a factor of eight, so wind simply cannot provide the baseload power.

And remember: Enviros will sue to stop the windmill farms (can you say “Kennedy?”) and the construction of new transmission lines to carry solar- and wind-generated electricity from the deserts and plains to the cities (Why, it’s the Sierra Club!) .

To solve the energy crisis America needs to get real. Aggressive responses will require environmental impacts, but those impacts will be regulated and excesses will be penalized by laws already in place. And the Enviros will have to forfeit their desire to save every bunny and bush from any contact with evil humans.

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I

n describing his pandering energy flip-flop new energy policy, Barack Obama told a crowd in Michigan:

“Breaking our oil addiction is one of the greatest challenges our generation will ever face. It will take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy.” (BBC, emphasis added)

Words like this should never leave the lips of a presidential candidate with strong socialistic roots. Saul Alinsky would have loved this quote, were the old Red rabble-rouser still alive today, but for most of us it’s fingernails on the blackboard … oops, sorry … board of color.

(Interesting, isn’t it, that Obama was an Alinsky-schooled community organizer in Alinsky’s hometown, and hometown gal Hillary’s college thesis was a paen to the same Alinsky? But I digress.)

In selecting the wording “complete economic transformation,” BO wasn’t being flip. Key elements of the new Obama plan are nothing if not straight out of the economic revolution playbook:

• He reiterated his call for a $1,000 stimulus/energy rebate for low and middle-income families, paid for by a windfall tax on oil companies. As I pointed out earlier, this scheme would likely bankrupt the oil companies, opening the door to nationalization. If he wants to push his Jimmy Carter Memorial Windfall Profits Tax, let him at least read some history first and explain himself.
• He called for the creation of five million new jobs over the next 10 years by investing $150 billion to help private efforts on clean energy. Where will the money come from? At what cost to other programs? Which other programs? And will it do any good at all? The silent hand of the free market is flailing about, seeking to fill the pockets of any fine capitalist who comes up with a good energy solution. Investors should invest, not government, and Obama could help this along if he would support elimination of the capital gains tax, which, of course, he doesn’t.
• And he set a goal of one million fuel-efficient hybrid cars to be put on the road by 2015. All of the above. In spades. And what if I want to drive a Corvette or a Veyron and have the money to do it? Or what if I want to buy a Prius but don’t want the government to use my tax dollars to “incentivize” me to do it because I’d rather just keep the tax dollars than process them back to me via the buck-suckers in DC.

Any Obamaniacs reading this will at this point (or perhaps much earlier) remind me (shrilly) that McCain also shifted his policy on drilling. Yes, but he had the good judgment to do it three weeks ago, before the polls got as strong on drilling as they are now. In other words, he saw the situation change and made a leadership decision to change policies. And he did it without a whole sermon speaking down to us so we’d understand and gain insight from his superior intellect.

Obama, on the other hand, couldn’t be convinced to get cross-wise with his Greenie financial supporters (i.e., “special interest groups”) and get right with the poor downtrodden he supposedly loves until he was sure the poll numbers weren’t flukey. Once the numbers were proved to be stuck on “DRILL!!” he wrote his sermon telling us – as if we didn’t know – that our approach to energy should be “comprehensive.” Really? Not just oil? Wow!

And, of course, he preached that his “comprehensive” plan (a word that’s gained sooo much stature since the immigration debates, by the way) would bring about a complete transformation of the American economy. Why? What’s wrong with it the way it is, temporary down-blip notwithstanding? What completely new type of economy should replace it?

He answered none of these questions. He just hung the word out there, like a big red star.

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever been more frightened by any words that have ever been uttered by a major presidential candidate. Only the most radical fringe of the American public wants a complete transformation of the world’s greatest and most enduring economy, so we must ask ourselves: Who is this Barack Obama, and why does he want to change us so radically?

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he socialist in Obama came out today with a proposal that sounds like step one in a scheme to nationalize the oil companies: He called for a $1,000 stimulus check to all Americans – after not being all that hot on the last stimulus check – to be paid out of oil company profits.

Read the full AP story here.

Half of the oil companies’ profits already go to the U.S. in taxes. Exxon Mobil, whose numbers came out this week and no doubt fired up the Fidel-Karl-Vladimir DNA in Obama’s soul, has paid $27 billion in taxes annually, on average, over the last three years. This year’s tax bill will be considerably higher. Economist Mark Perry puts this in perspective:

[J]ust one corporation (Exxon Mobil) pays as much in taxes ($27 billion) annually as the entire bottom 50% of individual taxpayers paid in 2004 (most recent year available), which is 65,000,000 people! Further, the tax rate for the bottom 50% was only 3% of adjusted gross income ($27.4 billion / $922 billion) in 2004, and the tax rate for Exxon was 41% in 2006 ($67.4 billion in taxable income, $27.9 billion in taxes).

But that’s not enough for Hugo Obama.

There are about 130 million tax returns filed annually. Let’s be conservative and say that Obama just wants to send his $1,000 check to those 130 million – husbands and wives (or, in Obamaland, husbands and husbands, wives and wives) would share a check and people who filed no return would get no check.  That would be another $130 billion dinger on the oil companies, with Exxon Mobil’s share perhaps $60 billion – which would bring the total the company would have to pay out in taxes and stimulus checks $87 billion  vs. annual income (last year) of $40.6 billion.

Unable to pay without dipping into reserves, Exxon Mobil would face two alternatives: Cut all exploration and jack up prices – thereby totally creaming the poor folks Obama supposedly cares about, or fold the tent, go bankrupt and be seized by our new president, Che Obama.

Art: An ObamaNation of Obama

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J

ust a year ago, about 60 percent of Californians opposed offshore drilling, but now a new survey from the highly regarded California polling organization the Public Policy Institute of California shows things have turned dramatically:

Fifty-one percent of Californians favor more oil drilling off the coast – a 10-point increase since July 2007 – according to a statewide survey released today by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). This is the first time since 2003, when PPIC first posed the question, that more Californians favor offshore drilling than oppose it (45%), a shift caused in large part by a surge in support among Republicans.

Expanding on that, PPIC reports that Republican support for drilling is now at 77 percent, up from 60 percent a year ago, and Independents are up to 44 percent from just 33 percent a year ago. Even Dem views are shifting, with 35 percent now in support, versus 29 percent last July.

Obama’s message promoting alternative energy will play well here, too, as support for greater research and commitment to alternative energy is strong across party lines, running at 83 percent.

But McCain’s new message – drill more/do more, do everything to reduce dependence on foreign oil – will resonate more powerfully here than Obama’s new message – be sure to fill your tires to the manufacturer’s specifications.

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Co-authored with Jim

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bit more than month has passed since Bill Moyers and Michael Winship penned their column It Was Oil, All Along. I missed it when it came out, and not very many bloggers have posted on it in the interim, so let’s set the Wayback Machine to June 27, 2008 and have some fun!

It Was Oil, All Along
By Bill Moyers & Michael Winship

Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn’t a war about oil. That’s cynical and simplistic, they said. It’s about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom turns out to be….the bottom line. It is about oil.

Shiver me timbers! Terror … al Qaeda … toppling Hussein … democracy in Iraq … all up in smoke! I missed that somehow. But then I never saw them as concocted, either.

Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir, “…Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” He elaborated in an interview with the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war.”

What one word best describes oil? To a lefty, it’s probably “pollution.” To a realist, it’s “strategic.” Were it not so, but it is so. Would they have us not make any effort to protect the world’s largest oil reserves from falling into the hands of a ruthless, anti-American despot? The Left would like everyone to believe that the US was out to steal the region’s oil, and they have convinced the most simpleminded among us.

Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. “…We had virtually no economic options with Iraq,” he explained, “because the country floats on a sea of oil.”

What’s not true about that statement?

Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Half-mad, he exclaims, “There’s a whole ocean of oil under our feet!” then adds, “No one can get at it except for me!”

No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except… guess who?

Would someone please name me a war in which the victorious army immediately dispatched troops to guard museums? Continue Reading »

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ver since the great drilling debate was launched, I’ve wondered why President Bush linked lifting the federal executive orders banning offshore drilling to Congress lifting its own drilling bans. It was a ridiculous position strategically, and it’s good that Bush is not so stubborn that he refused to change his tactics.

Now that he’s scratched the executive orders, all eyes are on Congress, where Bush should have directed them in the first place. (Is this really that hard to figure out?!)

From this a.m.’s WSJ, we see the Obama response to Bush’s call for expanded drilling:

Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said that if lifting the moratorium on offshore exploration “would provide short-term relief at the pump or a long-term strategy for energy independence, it would be worthy of our consideration, regardless of the risks. But most experts, even within the Bush administration, concede it would do neither.” The White House said Mr. Bush’s proposals would take years to have their full impact.

So? Let’s ask the obvious unasked question: How do oil’s years-to-market compare to the number of years it’ll take to get the ramshackle gaggle of alternative energies to make as big a contribution? No one’s guessing; but anyone with any critical capacity at all can and should question the Dem supposition that it’ll take capitalists sniffing money 10 years to stuff their pockets with bucks from new oil sales.

How about one year instead? Sound more realistic? From the same article:

A Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst said in a report there is a lot of offshore crude that can be produced relatively quickly. The problem: It is located off California, where politicians have built careers opposing new drilling.

The Minerals Management Service said that of the estimated 18 billion barrels of oil in off-limits coastal areas, almost 10 billion are off the coast of California.

“California could actually start producing new oil within a year if the moratorium were lifted,” the Sanford C. Bernstein report said, because the oil is under shallow water, has been explored and drilling platforms have been there since before the moratoria. (emphasis added)

One year! That would generate instantaneous downward price pressure on the oil futures market and would quickly impact the price at the pump.

So what did Obama’s Chicago hack politics buddy and DNC dirty work king Rahm Emanuel have to say about all this?

“I’ve been in Washington long enough to know a political stunt when I see one.”

And I know a political party trying desperately to appease its environmentalist, anti-corporate, elitist special interests when I see one.

Photo: Ian Parker

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reenies and urban planners hate suburbia, and now that global warming and gas prices are fighting for our attention, they’ve ratcheted up the rhetoric. Christopher Leinberger captures the mood in an Atlantic article called The Next Slum? -

A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.

And he chooses a suburb, Windy Ridge, to showcase his hypothesis:

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

His conclusion, that the suburbs will become a thing of the past and people will remove themselves to the inner city, the holy land of urban planners,  is incorrect because he ignores the simple fact that foreclosures are higher in the suburbs only because more people choose to live there.

Writes Joel Kotkin in an LA Times op/ed: Continue Reading »

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The NY Times Vs. Health And Truth

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recent NYT expose on the horrors of CT scans included this paragraph:

Some medical experts say the American devotion to the newest, most expensive technology is an important reason that the United States spends much more on health care than other industrialized nations — more than $2.2 trillion in 2007, an estimated $7,500 a person, about twice the average in other countries — without providing better care.

Without providing better care? Says who? Name me a country with better medical care – better results – than the good ol’ US of A!

Fortunately, there’s the internet with places like Stats Blog that provide answers to back up my jingoistic enthusiasm:

Last year, the journal Lancet Oncology published a huge comparative study of cancer survival rates in European countries and contrasted them with United States. The results:

Colon and rectal cancer: 65.5 percent in the U.S. vs 56.2 percent in Europe.
Breast cancer: 90.1 percent in the U.S. vs 79 percent in Europe.
Prostate cancer: 99.3 percent in the U.S. vs 77.5 percent in Europe.

All cancers (age adjusted), Men: 66.3 percent in the U.S. vs 47.3 percent in Europe.
All cancers (age adjusted), women: 62.9 percent in the U.S. vs 55.8 percent for women.

No individual country surpassed the U.S. on any of these measures – and these percentage differences add up to lives saved. If that doesn’t amount to “better care,” what does?

Not only to the stats show the inherent anti-American bias that runs rampant and untreated like a staph infection throughout the NYT and the MSM that mock it, it also shows the inherent weakness of socialized medicine. Europe is dominated by Big Brother with a Band-Aid programs of the sort the Dems would ape, yet they ignore the truth for the feeling and continue pushing us down that hopeless road. Continue Reading »

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A

s if we couldn’t see this one coming: As soon as the economy starts to tank and the cost of our love/hate relationship with oil goes up, society drops environmentalism like a potato that’s converting to carbon (for the trust fund kids, that would be a hot potato).

A survey conducted by a bunch of PR firms that represent green businesses found that environmental concerns are still profound in society, with two-thirds of respondents believing the environment is in worse shape today than it was five years ago. (For Americans, this is false. Due to intense regulations, our environment continues to improve.)

But even with this heightened concern for the environment, commitment to the environment dropped: 75% of Americans now rank the economy as a more important issue than the environment. Throw the Greenies overboard, Mildred! This is all about Greenbacks now!

You’ll love this quote from one of the PR wonderkinds:

“We have been tracking perceptions of green for over three years, and this year’s results are somewhat alarming in that they indicate consumers only prioritize the environment when all other concerns are equal,” said Russ Meyer, chief strategy officer of Landor Associates.

Russ ol’ boy, how did you get to be chief strategy officer if you think that news is alarming? Excuse me while I take my business elsewhere. Here’s the new dawn breaking further on Meyers’ new reality:

“With agricultural commodities running low and the rising cost of gas in the United States, Americans indicate they have more immediate concerns than the environment. With the United Kingdom also beginning to feel the economic crunch, we see some signs of the mentality there beginning to shift.”

Such is the fate of the environmental movement. We love it when it doesn’t cost much to love it, and we dump it as soon as it starts interfering with our quality of life.

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ou know the drill: Don’t drill. More supply won’t do anything to reduce energy costs, we’re told. It’s as if the Greenies have the power to dictate how markets will react, not at all unlike the Politboro deeming that the newest Soviet 5-year plan would actually work, despite the junk heap of failed 5-year plans.

The Greenies, like the Soviets before them, couch their “no drill” energy policy in economic mumbo-jumbo – unlike the former chair of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, who lays out clear direction for how to lower oil prices in today’s WSJ. And – surprise, surprise! – what he recommends is exactly what C-SM has been recommending for some time now: Do everything.

Feldstein starts by answering the age-old question: How do oil producers decide whether to pump or not?

Unlike perishable agricultural products, oil can be stored in the ground. So when will an owner of oil reduce production or increase inventories instead of selling his oil and converting the proceeds into investible cash? A simplified answer is that he will keep the oil in the ground if its price is expected to rise faster than the interest rate that could be earned on the money obtained from selling the oil. The actual price of oil may rise faster or slower than is expected, but the decision to sell (or hold) the oil depends on the expected price rise.

Surging demand from China and India, along with continuing environmental constraints in the US, make it a pretty clear bet that oil will continue to appreciate faster than the interest rate, so there’s no big incentive to increase production now, despite the high prices.

Oil guys control the strings for drill/no drill, but they don’t control all the factors that go into oil pricing, as Feldstein points out:

Now here is the good news. Any policy that causes the expected future oil price to fall can cause the current price to fall, or to rise less than it would otherwise do. In other words, it is possible to bring down today’s price of oil with policies that will have their physical impact on oil demand or supply only in the future.

For example, increases in government subsidies to develop technology that will make future cars more efficient, or tighter standards that gradually improve the gas mileage of the stock of cars, would lower the future demand for oil and therefore the price of oil today.

Similarly, increasing the expected future supply of oil would also reduce today’s price. That fall in the current price would induce an immediate rise in oil consumption that would be matched by an increase in supply from the OPEC producers and others with some current excess capacity or available inventories.

So here’s the model energy bill: Fund the development of alternative energy sources, including solar, coal oil, tar sands, wind; break down barriers to new production, whether it’s a refinery or a wind farm off the Kennedy compound; announce new drilling lease auctions for the outer continental shelf and Alaska’s North Slope, including ANWR; launch a nuclear plant building program, with all reasonable government incentives; create or extend tax credits for the purchase of high efficiency cars and equipment; create a single, nationwide gasoline standard so refineries can compete across state lines.

An environmentalist’s nightmare, to be sure, but a surefire tactic for knocking the bottom out of gas prices.

All it takes is the gumption to stand up for real people instead of mythical global warming doomsday scenarios.

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