Skyrockets in Flight

The past month, for all its many flaws, was at least easy on the utility bills around here. Although a stubborn winter persisted into the usual spring it did not require us to run the gas-fired furnace at any point, and the few days of high temperatures had us opening windows but not running the electrified air-conditioning, so our energy costs fora the billing period seemed almost reasonable. We plan to savor the satisfaction of writing those two-digit checks we sent off over the weekend, because summer will soon be sizzling on the plains and the Obama administration is intent on making our bills skyrocket.

You could be forgiven for having missed the news, given the media obsession with that five-dangerous-terrorists-for-a-deserter swap the administration had announced a day earlier, but new rules imposed by presidential fiat that will cause electric bills to skyrocket were trotted out by the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday. The stated reason for these new regulations is to reduce carbon emissions by 30 percent over the next 16 years, which we are promised will save thousands of lives otherwise lost to asthma attacks and reduce the rate of employee absenteeism, as well as rescuing the earth from global warming and the sexual infidelity that it seems to be causing in the more affluent neighborhoods of south Florida, but we don’t doubt that it also will also cause our air-conditioning expenses during the inevitable prairie heat waves to skyrocket. We base this on the assurances of President Barack Obama himself, who was candid enough during his ’08 campaign to admit that “under my plan of a cap-and=trade system electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”

You could be forgiven for having missed that quote during the ’08 presidential race, too, as Obama spoke it in a rare moment of candor to a San Francisco Chronicle editorial board that was not inclined to publicize the outrageous boast and instead left it embedded two or three clicks away on a web site where it seems to have gone unnoticed even by the McCain for President for campaign. This led to a President Obama appointing an Energy Secretary who desired that Americans pay as much for a gallon of gasoline as their over-charged European counterparts, which also went unmentioned by most of the media during those heady days of hope and change, but those who were paying acute attention understood that the price of staying warm in the winter and cool in the summer and getting around all year would skyrocket. It’s not cap–and-trade, which even the filibuster-proof Democratic Congress of ’08-to’10 wouldn’t dare pass, but it’s the closest Obama can come  given the the rapidly diminishing restrains of the constitutional system.

In a Memorial Day radio address that was also widely overlooked, President Obama said the newly-imposed carbon emissions would have a salutary effect on the American economy. The theory, as it’s been explained to us by the grandees of the liberal press and the hirsute hipsters who frequent the same dives we do, is that raising the cost of the most readily available and cost-effiicient sources will spur an economic boom in the the currently unaffordable sectors but politically well-cnnected sectors of the energy sector, but none of these arguments promise continued lower utility bills. The  bills will also be higher for everyone we buy things forms, and we’ll not be the only ones buying less of what everyone has to sell when they raise prices to pay for skyrocketing electricity bills, but anyone with an alternative-energy scam who has made the requisite campaign contributions should do well.

Sooner or later we’ll relent to turn on the air-conditioning, even if we’re the hardy types who wait  several days into that annual stretch of 100-plus temperatures, but we’ll take some satisfaction in the political repercussions. The EPA’s never-mind-Congress rules are likely to help Republican candidates in embattled Kentucky and by now rock- olid West Virginia and other parts of coal country, as well as Indiana and other states where 80 percent of the electrical air-conditioning comes from coal, and even in the safest Democratic districts it will be hard to blame those swelling utility bills on the Republicans. Arguing that global warming requires such expensive measures will be harder while simultaneously arguing that a harsh winter was the reason for that little noticed contraction the economy during the lat quarter, and when even National Public Radio and the America Broadcasting System and CNN are playing up the deserter angle on that five-dangerous-terrorists-for-a-deserter-swap it’s going to be hard to sell that higher-energy-costs-are-good-for-the economy claptrap.

— Bud Norman

Alternative Alchemy

Legend has it that back in the Dark Ages there were kings who spent fortunes on an effort to turn lead into gold. Even at that point in western science it was known that lead and gold are tantalizingly close in their chemical compositions, and the kings assumed that all that was needed to make up the slight difference was a vast amount of the taxpayers’ money.

A similar assumption seems to underlie the Obama administration’s energy policy, which seeks to turn wind, sunshine, algae, and anything else at hand into something as powerful and affordable as oil and coal. All that’s needed to achieve this transmutation, apparently, is several billion dollars more of federal funding.

With oil prices recently on the rise, and the public’s discontent rising at a commensurate pace, Obama flew his petroleum-powered jet to North Carolina on Wednesday to defend this notion. After assuring the crowd at a German-owned truck factory in Mount Holly that his policies have increased oil production in America, Obama called oil a “fuel of the past” and prophesied a glorious future of alternative energies and more fuel-efficient vehicles.

The part about his administration increasing domestic oil production simply isn’t true, as disgruntled oil producers around the country will attest. There has indeed been an increase in the amount of oil being pumped here, but it’s been on private lands beyond Obama’s control or from leases issued by previous administrations. The administration’s policy has been to keep almost all federal lands untapped, enforce a moratorium on Gulf drilling, and “slow-walk” new permits.

The part about the alternative energy-powered future might happen, but there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical about it happening anytime soon. Even Obama’s Department of Energy’s can’t offer a more optimistic projection than 13 percent of America’s energy production coming from alternative sources by 2035, and history gives no reason to be hopeful that federal funding will help us get there.

The Solyndra debacle and the Chevy Volt fiasco are but two notable examples of the government’s “green” failures, and the big successes that the administration’s cheerleaders at The Hill cite are the re-organization of the bankrupt EnerDel company and that taxpayers will recover 70 percent of a loan to the Beacon Power Corporation’s bankrupt energy storage plant. The government has been at work on alternative energy sources since at least the ‘70s, when President Jimmy Carter set a goal of obtaining 20 percent of America’s energy from solar power by the year 2000, and the results have not been encouraging. To borrow a word from the alchemists’ lexicon, more federal money is not a panacea.

Which raises the question of why it has to be federal money. Anyone who does invent a power source that is less expensive and just as efficient as oil will become very, very wealthy as a result, and that should entice the smart money into the most promising avenues of research. The inevitable technological breakthrough might be discovered by government scientists who will be paid the same if they fail or succeed, or it might be found by private entities that will be rich if they succeed and broke if they don’t, but we’re inclined to bet on the latter. The people staking their own money will also be more careful in choosing which technologies to invest in, rather than governments, which always seem to wind up backing the biggest campaign contributors.

The alchemists’ failed experiments yielded some knowledge that later became useful, but they never did figure out how to turn lead into gold. Centuries later science did figure out how to do it, but not in a way that was less expensive than the price of gold. The modern day energy alchemists will probably provide some new science, too, but don’t expect that they’ll soon be able to turn wind, sunshine, algae, and whatever’s at hand into power. They might be able to provide alternative energy at a competitive price when oil gets to $600 a barrel, but the Obama administration hasn’t achieved that yet.

Then again, the price of gold is now $1,686 an ounce, while WTI crude oil is selling at a relatively cheap $106.41 a barrel, so perhaps the government would do better to invest in some old-fashioned alchemy.

 — Bud Norman