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The End of Greenism?
Guest Column | By Raymond Kraft | June 10, 2008
It
hasn't quite hit the radar of the liberals in Congress, but as the
price of gasoline soars above $4 a gallon (and here in California it's
closing in on $5), they're going to be facing a hard choice with no
good options. They will be forced to (a) throw the Greens under the bus, and embrace the idea of drilling for oil in America, in ANWR, off the coasts, wherever it may be found, or (b) throw the U.S. economy under the bus, and lose the November election to a Republican landslide, no matter who their candidate is.
If,
that is, John McCain can be persuaded to see the light, come to his
senses, and make a prime time speech in which he apologizes for being
wrong about global warming and climate change, has learned that CO2 is
not the enemy, that humans have no identifiable effect on climate,
which has always been changing, and humans cannot stop it; and that it
is far more important to produce enough energy from all sources,
nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind, oil, and coal, than to go tilting at
the windmills of Greenism to stop the unstoppable climate change, which
is entirely natural and organic.
If John McCain can learn
that lesson, he can turn the issue of global warming and climate change
on its head, and use it to take down his opponent and the Greens and
Greenism in the next four months. But it must be done as a frontal
attack, a headlong cavalry charge straight up the hill into the face of
the enemy; something neither his opponent nor the Greens are prepared
for. It would throw them into total panic and disarray.
Last week
oil prices spiked $10.75 in one day, a new record, closing Friday at
$138.54. Unemployment rose 10% in one month, May, from 5% to 5.5%. The
Dow dropped 394 points, the biggest drop in over a year. The average
working stiff has seen his cost to commute to work and home again
double in less thantwo years, even as the equity in his house
plummeted.And airlines are cutting hundreds of flights, and thousands
of jobs. The high cost of not drilling for oil in America is going to
savage the economy at every level.
Cybercast News Service (CNS News), in a June 6th article entitled "Lawmakers Split on Drilling for Vast Amounts of Oil in USA," reports
that the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management estimates
there are 139 billion barrels of untapped, recoverable oil onshore and
offshore in the United States. This does not include the vast Bakken oil
fields of Montana and the Dakotas, or the enormous shale oil deposits
in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, or the oil sands ofOklahoma.CNS
interviewed four members of Congress and found the Republicans
supporting Jed Babbin's call to"drill here, drill now," while Democrats were opposed.
Sen.
Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said, "You've got that right.We can't get it (the
oil) becausethe environmental elitists are preventing that with
moratoria saying it would take ten years to get it developed."Rep. Mike
Pence (R-Ind.) also said Congress should deregulate to allow more
drilling. "My sense is that the most direct route is for Congress to
take direct action and give the American people more access to American
oil."
Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) replied, "No," adding that he
would "never say never," but that circumstances would have to be
"pretty drastic" for him to agree to more drilling. "I am more
concerned about global warming and the impact of fossil fuel," he
said.House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) told CNS he
needs to study the issue more. "I haven't studied enough to make that
decision," he said.
But a lot of middle class, working class, and
fixed-income Americans have studied the issue quite enough, and they're
beginning to get angry, visibly angry, at the inexcusable inaction of
Congress. As gas prices continue to rise through the summer, the anger
will swell into fury. "Earth to Mike Honda," they'll be saying
soon, "For us, your constituents, five dollar gasoline is pretty
drastic. Earth to Charlie Rangel, how many years do you have to study to
learn what you can learn in a day? If it takes that long, Charlie, are
you sure you're smart enough to be a member of Congress?"
Wasn't
it Mark Twain who once quipped, "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose
you were a member of Congress - but I repeat myself."
Presently,
we import 5.4 million barrels of oil a day from OPEC countries. At $138
a barrel, that's $745 million dollars a day we're "exporting" to Saudi
Arabia and its neighbors. At 40 jobs per million dollars (at $50,000 a
year per job) that's 29,800 jobs for Americans we are "outsourcing" to
OPEC each day, rather than investing that money in American oil
production and American jobs. At 29,800 jobs a day, that's 10,877,000
American jobs we are exporting to OPEC each year, and if the price of
oil rises, so will the job loss. Democrats havethreatened to punish
corporations that outsource jobs to other countries, but the Democrats' own misbegotten Green policies are the No. 1cause of outsourcing in in America.
At
some point, something has to give, and it will either be the U.S.
economy or Greenism, the obsessive-compulsive Environmentalist
Personality Disorder that will sacrifice the jobs, fortunes, futures,
and lives, of three hundred million Americans, in slavish homage to the
myth that burning "fossil fuels" is causing climate change, and that by
reducing our "carbon footprint" we can end climate change. Nothing is
further from the truth. The climate has been changing as long as there
has been a climate, long before we could have had anything to do with
it.
How we ended up with a majority in Congress, and two
presidential candidates, who are so appallingly ignorant of the basics
of climatology, climate history, and the ubiquity of climate
change,after this debate has already been raging for years, is a
complete mystery to me. It is, in my opinion, Congressional
malpractice: the willful or negligent failure of most members of
Congress to become well informed about the real science and history of
climate change andwhat the effect, if any, of CO2 on the global climate
really is, or isn't, before making legislative decisions that
profoundly affect the lives of 300 million Americans. And I wonder: can
we sue Congress, for Congressional Malpractice?
Can we sue
Congress for acting on false assumptions, when, by the exercise of
reasonable care and due diligence, they could, and should, have become
fully and honestly informed on the global warming and climate change
issues, before making bad decisions that adversely affect the U.S.
economy and the lives of every one of their constituents? Don't they
have that duty? And haven't they breached it? And aren't we paying for
it?
There is only one way to rescue America from the rising
cost of energy that threatens to overwhelm the U.S. economy. And that is
to produce more energy. As soon as possible. In America.
We don't
have time to wait for pie-in-the-sky fantasies, such as cellulosic
ethanol from switchgrass. A little arithmetic tells us that to replace
oil with switchgrass, which according to National Geographic can produce "up to" 1,000 gallons of ethanol per acre, per year, we'd
have to produce a billion gallons a day, to replace the gasoline and
diesel we consume. That's 365 billion gallons a year, plus another 15%
to provide the energy to produce all that cellulosic ethanol from
switchgrass, for a total of 420 billion gallons a year. This would
require 420 cellulosic ethanol plants producing a billion gallons a
year, each, and so far, we don't have one. Not one producer of
cellulosic ethanol on a commercial scale. And it would require 420
million acres of switchgrass farms, which would be a 150% increase in
American farmland. And would not the adverse environmental impact of
converting 420 million acres ofwildlife habitat to switchgrass farms be
enormous? Where are the Greens now? Why isn't the Sierra Club demanding an
Environmental Impact Report?
Congress needs to come to grips with
the fact that there is no credible evidence that CO2 causes "global
warming." It has been warmer in the past, when CO2 was lower than now,
and the temperature dropped 0.7 degrees last year, while CO2 was
rising. But CO2 is plant food, fertilizer, plants suck it up and grow,
and more CO2 in the air means plants grow faster, and need less water.
With a growing world population facing chronic food shortages, we need more CO2 in the air to produce more food, not less.
And
this means the misguided, misbegotten, delusional era of Greenism has to
end. Soon. Now. The delusions of the radical environmentalists have taken
us down this dangerous road, and the chickens are coming home to
roost. And the chickens are very expensive. Having quarantined 90% of
Federal lands from energy exploration and development, and blocked
construction of nuclear power, and fuel refineries, it is the
environmentalist policies, the Green policies, the Greenism, of the
last generation that has put American in the spot it's in, and America
can only get out of the spot by rejecting the delusional Greenism of the
past, and embracing a rational energy policy for the future.
I'm with Barack Obama. I want "change"...but maybe not the same change BarackObama wants.
Here's the change I want:
1.
Legislation to immediately lift all moratoria on oil and natural gas
exploration and development on Federal lands, except National Parks.
2. Legislation to grant a 100% tax credit for all new capital investment in energy production in the U.S. and its
territorial waters. If you spent $20,000 to put solar panels on your
roof, you get a $20,000 tax credit. If Exxon puts $75 billion into
developing new oil production in the U.S., Exxon gets a $75 billion tax
credit. This would "send a message" to OPEC that the party's just about
over, and it would create millions of new jobs for working
classAmericans in America.
3. Legislation to fast-track
NRC-approved nuclear power plant designs, and to require Green
plaintiffs suing to block the construction of nuclear power
plants, geothermal plants, oil refineries, or any other energy
project, to prove by "clear and convincing evidence" that the proposed
project was unreasonably dangerous, or that the harm it would cause was
greater than the benefit it would confer.
Barack Obama said
recently that he will deliver "$150 billion over the next ten years" to
develop alternative energy. That's way too little, way too late. America
needs it now, not ten years from now. We don't need to pass it through
the government skim machine. And Barry is clueless. By granting a 100%
tax credit for new capital investment in energy in the United States,
we unleash the magnificent ingenuity of the American people, who will
pump $150 billion into energy development in one year, not ten, and
produce ten times, or a hundred times, as much new energy in ten years
as any government-managed program ever could.
That's change.
And that's the end of Greenism.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Raymond S. Kraft is an attorney in Northern California. He can be reached at
Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.
5 Comments | Post a Comment
Thank you so very much for a well articulated and logical article on Greenism! This needs to be proclaimed from the rooftops loudly and prominently!Thank you!
joyfulsingingmom and I heartilly agree that your excellent article needs nationwide exporure - now! Time is of the essence!
Greenies belong to world organizations which believes world population growth is unsustainable. So they do not care how many babies are aborted in wombs. Back in past electric cars were very viable but oil companies got rid of them. Politicians are beholden to them so they won’t change.
June 11 at 10:13 am | #1 | Link
It seems to me that you lumped the “greens”, as you called them, in with environmentalists, especially in the following:
“They will be forced to (a) throw the Greens under the bus, and embrace the idea of drilling for oil in America, in ANWR, off the coasts, wherever it may be found.....”
While the view of a pristine environment is a view shared among many “greens”, it is not the main reason most of these people are against drilling for oil in our country. Most of the reasoning falls in the “greenist” view of providing the public with energy resources that are sustainable and not wasteful.
I believe that the money that it would take to drill this oil and build its trade routes would be put to much better use funding research into new, more efficient energy sources. Although it is a fact that oil is currently our cheapest and most efficient source of energy currently, that is not a valid argument as to keep it the standard untill we are left with no other options.
This kind of lapse in the development of intilect and knowledge is something that, taken to its extreme, could destroy a civilization.