As of this morning, after all the rhetoric from Obama, the US has no plan to reduce dependence on foreign energy sources. Obama’s ban on off shore drilling remains in place. At the same time, the US is sending billions of dollars to help Brazil and some other countries drill in deep offshore waters. So let’s get this clear: US companies cannot drill in offshore waters because it is too dangerous, that means US jobs are lost and the US becomes more dependent on foreign oil. At the same time, our government can give money to less developed countries to do exactly the same type of “dangerous” drilling, a move which will shift jobs overseas and endanger the environment. After all, if oil from an American well can endanger the oceans, so too can oil from a Brazilian well. Indeed, one would assume that will all our recent practice, a US well would be less likely to cause a disaster. Meanwhile, Obama has remained silent about developing the abundant natural gas supply of the USA. He has said nothing about converting cars and trucks so that they can run on natural gas. He has done nothing to promote filling stations for nat gas anywhere in the country. For nuclear energy we have gotten a talkfest. Obama says that our energy future has to include nuclear energy, but he has done nothing at all to promote that energy source. For solar and wind energy, much has been said, and something has been done, but these sources will supply less than 5% of US energy needs for the foreseeable future. With regards to coal, Obama has threatened to kill it as an energy supply via the cap and trade proposal. That would wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs and force the US to import ever greater quantities of oil from abroad. So, as I said at the beginning of this post, the US has no plan to reduce dependence on foreign energy sources. Quite the contrary, Obama policies are designed to increase that dependence.
For the last 37 years, every American politician who has run for national office has spoken of the need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Obama has joined that club. Those in the past at least tried to achieve energy independence through a variety of means. Nixon started with the synfuels corporation, a government sponsored effort to create fuel from biomass. It failed when the price of oil plummeted. Others pushed for ethanol, a project which became a welfare plan for American farmers. Some wanted increased drilling. Some wanted conservation. None of them made great progress, but they tried. Obama has just talked, but his actions have made things much worse, rather than helping.
So what can be done? Simply put, there is no one answer; rather, there are many. Any rational plan has to start with making better use of America’s own energy. This will allow for the creation of jobs here at home and a reduction of the money sent overseas to purchase foreign oil. Keeping this money in the US will help stimulate economic growth. It will also reduce the revenue available to foreign countries that produce oil but that are not very friendly to the US. After all, why pursue a policy that enriches Iran. Do we want to indirectly support Iranian efforts to kill American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq?
The most abundant energy sources that the US has are coal and natural gas. The US has enough coal to meet all its energy needs for the foreseeable future. Coal, however, is dirty, so it is out of favor. A rational energy program would try to solve this problem. In other words, a rational energy program would put federal funds behind a program to find a process to create clean energy from coal. This has been tried in the past without success. Past failure is not guarantee of future failure, however. In the stimulus bill, the government funded research into things like the sex lives of college freshmen, salamander reproduction and a whole host of absolutely silly subjects. Rather than spending 50 billion dollars on that nonsense, wouldn’t it have made sense to take half of that amount and spend the 25 billion dollars on clean coal research? A breakthrough here could change the lives of all Americans.
A plan for increasing the use of natural gas also makes sense. Right now, new gas fields have been discovered that could provide an enormous portion of US needs for many decades. There are vehicles that already run on nat gas. For example, in New York City, the Transit Authority runs buses in Manhattan that use nat gas as their fuel. The production of natural gas powered cars would be a simple matter of tooling up factories. The problem is that there are not nat gas filling stations, so there would be no where for the cars to get their fuel supplies. There should be a federal program to promote the deployment of nat gas filling stations and the use of nat gas cars. For example, imagine the boost to the nat gas industry is all post office vehicles were converted over to nat gas as they were replaced. The same is true of the hundreds of thousands of regular cars that the government purchases.
Natural gas cars are about 75% cleaner than comparable gasoline powered cars. A change to natural gas would help the environment while reducing the carbon footprint that the global warming folks fear. Natural gas is also much less expensive per btu than oil at the moment. Indeed, the price differential is bigger now on a sustained basis than at any time in the last fifty years. Simply put, there is an abundance of natural gas and a shortage of oil. A change to natural gas automobiles will raise the price of that energy source and bring down the cost of oil. The net effect, however, will be a reduction in energy costs across the entire American economy. If one wanted a lasting economic stimulus, it is hard to imagine a better one than reducing energy prices. Further, the known domestic sources of natural gas are so great that a rise would use of nat gas would be met by a rise in production to meet the need. That means more jobs for American workers.
If the US were to hit the daily double of increasing natural gas use and finding a clean energy source to produce from coal, all of its energy woes would be solved. Indeed, achieving either one of those goals would go a long way towards solving the problem. Unfortunately, right now in Washington, the government is not trying for either solution. Obama wants to put the coal industry out of business and has proposed legislation that will do just that. Obama never speaks about natural gas; it is as if he does not want the people to realize that there is a reasonable solution using American resources and American workers that would take the government out of the energy control business.
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