The article highlights how the White House and Congress are trying to use the Gulf oil spill crisis to advance their cap-tax-and-trade, anti-oil, pro-renewable energy agenda – without regard to vitally important energy, economic and environmental facts of life, and while ignoring the high costs of carbon taxes and wind and solar power. The authors lay the facts out succinctly and forcefully in their column. PD
Congress and the White House are using to Gulf oil spill to advance dubious energy agendas
Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr., Niger Innis and Reverend Samuel Rodriquez
Business and capitalism are dirty words in many White House and progressive circles, except in two ways.
Business is good when it can be co-opted and manipulated by government to advance “progressive” energy, social or economic agendas. And capitalism is a virtue in the sense of capitalizing on every crisis to promote those agendas – through the guiding principle enshrined by leftists like Saul Alinsky and Rahm Emanuel: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
Thus the tragic Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been incompetently handled by a White House, EPA and Corps of Engineers unable even to make timely decisions about constructing sand berms to keep oil out of fragile estuaries. But the crisis is being exploited brilliantly to justify policy initiatives like cap-tax-and-trade, EPA’s “endangerment” decree, more bans on drilling, and mandatory fuel switching to higher priced options, most notably wind and solar power.
The economic facts of life simply don’t support this agenda.
Senator John Kerry asserts that China and India are spending billions to take our “clean energy” discoveries and technologies, make the wind turbines and solar panels in Asia, and sell them back to us. He is right about what’s happening, but completely wrong about why. The fault, dear Senator, is not in our stars (or in Asia), but in ourselves.
China and India pay their workers less than we do, especially in union shops so beloved by progressives. They use coal to generate cheap electricity to power their factories, while the White House, EPA and Congress strive to tax and regulate American coal-fired power plants into oblivion. China mines its abundant rare earth minerals (essential for wind turbine magnets and Prius batteries), whereas we have made hundreds of millions of acres of superb mineral prospects off limits.