A ‘Green’ Catastrophe in the Making

By Arnold Ahlert
JWR.com 

Since 1973, Americans have been watching an accident in slow motion. That was the year that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), began to understand the economic leverage they had over Western, oil-dependent nations. At that point America, whose last year of energy self-sufficiency was 1950, was importing 35% of its energy. Over the next two years, in retaliation for the unsuccessful attempt by several Arab nations to annihilate Israel in the Yom Kippur War, OPEC more than tripled the price of a barrel of oil. A severe recession occurred, and people were forced to wait in long lines on alternate days to buy gasoline. In terms of energy independence or stability, we've never recovered.

On 1 October 1977, The Department of Energy (DOE) became a reality as the result of the Department of Energy Organization Act. Its responsibilities included dealing with energy development, research, and national security. This cabinet-level Department was an outgrowth of the Nixon administration's Federal Energy Office, which was replaced by the Federal Energy Administration (FEA) an agency tasked with controlling oil's allocation and prices for three years.

In 1974, Gerald Ford established the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) which was followed by a flurry of bills, including the The Solar Heating and Cooling Act of 1974, the Geothermal Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration Act of 1974, and the Solar Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration Act of 1974. All of these efforts were aimed at encouraging research on renewable energy. The Department of Energy was an effort to re-organize federal agencies. At the time, president Jimmy Carter attempted to vest the Secretary of Energy with the power to set wholesale electricity rates and crude oil prices. Congress gave that power to the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) instead.

In 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was formed to consolidate various federal program connected with the environment. That same year Congress passed the Clean Air Act, giving EPA the power to set and America to achieve national air standards. The EPA had much success in several arenas, such as reducing pollution levels throughout the country, from acid rain in the Northeast to smog in California, getting lead out of gasoline, regulating toxic chemicals, and protecting the nation's drinking water.

No doubt these agencies were created with the best of intentions. Yet when one considers that the primary impetus for creating the Department of Energy was to make this country as energy self-sufficient as possible (Richard Nixon was hoping to achieve such a goal by 1980), how can one contend that it is anything less than a spectacular failure? America's reliance on imported oil has risen to almost 70%, we haven't built a nuclear reactor in this country in over three decades (even as France gets 75% of its electricity from nuclear), and so-called alternative energy development has been revealed for the unrealistic solution it truly is at best, to the outright fraud of a "jobs-producing green agenda," at worst.

Yet this failure cannot be blame on the DOE alone. The EPA has abetted that failure with its attempt to impose costly energy regulations on businesses and consumers to "save the planet from man-made global warming"--a task it apparently intends to implement with or without Congressional approval. Furthermore, the Obama administration's recalcitrance in addressing America's genuine energy needs problem is so severe, a contempt of court ruling was issued against its Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, for defying a court order to end the moratorium on off-shore drilling. This third government agency, which forms an unholy triumvirate with the DOE and the EPA, is also doing everything it can to suppress domestic energy exploration and production.

How unrealistic are these efforts? First, as the Wall Street Journal reports, while American deep-water oil production is languishing, "in other parts of the world...deep-water drilling has continued at a frenetic pace. The industry is moving full speed ahead in places like the Gulf of Guinea, the Mediterranean and the Turkish Black Sea." Second, China and India have resolutely refused to limit their production of greenhouse gases, which, while associated with so-called global warming, are also inextricably associated with economic development. Third, many European nations, most notably Germany and Spain, have stopped subsidizing green energy projects, largely in recognition of the fact that the costs far outweigh the benefits.

One may question the wisdom of such developments, but one fact remains beyond dispute: as long as other nations are pursuing their own agendas, any unilateral attempt by the United States to "save the planet" is doomed to fail.

None of this, nor the fact that America spends billions upon billions of dollars buying oil from regimes that hate us, support terror, or are in the throes of violent upheaval has altered this administration's determination to "wean America off oil," even as nothing remotely viable is available to take its place. Even as the unrest in Libya has sent price shocks through the oil industry, the president told a group of executives last week that "we actually think that we'll be able to ride out the Libya situation and it will stabilize."

Such an assessment is an astonishing disconnect from reality. Our third largest supplier of oil, Saudi Arabia, is facing its own Facebook-generated "Day of Rage" scheduled for March 11th. While the trajectory of any demonstrations there is more likely to follow what happened to protests in Iran, where uprisings have been successfully suppressed--as opposed to the number of Middle East nations where they have not--anything which threatens Saudi oil production would be nothing short of catastrophic with regard to oil prices and the American economy. "Riding out" such an event would be impossible, with predictions of oil rising to $200-per barrel or more.

All of which may begin to happen in less than two weeks time.

For the last four decades, Americans, who favor domestic energy production by a two-to-one margin, have been told that we are being "held hostage" by oil-exporting nations. That is, quite simply, a lie. America is holding itself hostage, courtesy of progressives for whom no amount of economic upheaval, no number of job losses, and no increase in the national debt or deficit spending is too high a price to pay for the continued implementation of their "green" agenda. Even America's national security is a secondary consideration for a movement whose philosophy can be reduced to one over-riding idea:

We have to destroy America in order to save it. [Quote: Oct. 28, 2008: We are FOUR DAYS AWAY from fundamentally transforming the United States of America! The Destroyer in Chief is hard at work with his agenda.]

Fasten your government-mandated seat belts, my fellow Americans. We may be headed for one of the bumpiest rides in the history of the nation. And President Obama, who once warned that his energy policies will "bankrupt" the coal industry, make electricity rates "skyrocket," and "break our dependence on oil," the man who promised "fundamentally transform America" during the 2008 election campaign will be leading the charge.