Sabotaging America: The Obama Energy Agenda
The Obama administration’s lack of any coherent, realistic energy policy is providing Republican candidates with a good deal of ammunition, as gas prices and oil prices continue to rise. The issue has put the president on the defensive as the specter of five dollar per gallon gas this summer gives Team Obama heartburn.
“It’s the easiest thing in the world (to) make phony election-year promises about lower gas prices,” Obama said, speaking at the University of Miami yesterday. “What’s harder is to make a serious, sustained commitment to tackle a problem that may not be solved in one year or one term or even one decade.”
Indeed. Clearly, making a serious, sustained commitment to a sound energy policy is well beyond this administration’s capabilities. Rather than investing in proven, affordable and plentiful sources of domestic energy, Obama has thrown billions of tax dollars away in misguided efforts to find pixie dust solutions to America’s energy needs.
From wind, to solar, to bio-fuels, the president has abandoned the free market to cast his lot in with the most extreme of environmental utopians and we’re all paying the price for his folly. This president, who asserts that America’s future depends on science and technology, has yet to even come to grips with the basic laws of thermodynamics. That level of scientific ignorance doesn’t bode well for consumers, or for Obama’s re-election prospects.
The president has tried to blame rising gas prices on factors that are beyond his control, such as increased demand from China and India, increasing tension with Iran and speculation in oil futures. While it’s accurate to say that America can do little to influence those factors, it’s entirely disingenuous to ignore the fact that we could have – and should have – taken action to mitigate those market effects.
We have seen crude demand in China and India rise steadily for over a decade now. That it continues to do so as those economies continue to grow shouldn’t surprise anyone, least of all the president of the United States. The same holds true for the effect of the Iranian nuclear crisis. And, given all of the uncertainty and demand-side pressure, it’s clear that the free market is going to respond by hedging its bets in the form of rising oil future prices. The president sees the latter in terms of greedy speculation, but Obama has long-since abandoned any pretense of understanding – or caring – about the way that a healthy free market actually works.
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