God Save America

By Alan Caruba

In early March, President Bush, addressing an International Renewable Energy Conference, was widely quoted saying that the United States has to “get off oil.” Earlier he had said that America was “addicted” to oil. These are such huge lies one wonders why he is telling them, unless perhaps he has quietly been investing in ethanol production.

For the record, “renewable” energy refers to solar and wind energy for electricity, and biofuels for transportation. None of these options can ever be expected to provide the electric energy America uses, nor will biofuels ever replace oil for transportation.

In one of the most brilliant analysis of America’s dependency on oil, “Gusher of Lies”, by Robert Bryce, the author spells out the realities of a world in which, not just the United States, but all nations are going to be importing oil for as long as crude can be pumped from places around the world that include the Middle East, Russia, Africa, South America, and the deep ocean waters.

The problem is not a lack of known reserves of oil. The problem is the way the lack of knowledge by the consuming public is being exploited.

Yes, the price of a barrel of oil has reached and surpassed $107, but that price is subject to a myriad of factors that have nothing to do with scarcity. As OPEC president, Chakib Khelil, told reporters recently, “There is sufficient supply. There’s plenty of oil there.”  He’s telling the truth. One factor is the falling value of the U.S. dollar. Oil that is priced in Euros has not risen nearly as much.

“Energy independence,” says Bryce, “is hogwash. From nearly any standpoint—economic, military, political, or environmental—energy independence makes no sense. Worse yet, the inane obsession with the idea of energy independence is preventing the U.S. from having an honest and effective discussion about the energy challenges it now faces.”

Nowhere is this more obvious in the campaigns of the Democrat and Republican candidates. John McCain, the GOP nominee, is committed to the global warming hoax that is based on the lie that the use of all forms of energy is contributing “greenhouse gas” emissions at such a rate the Earth is warming dramatically. It isn’t. There isn’t a scintilla of scientific data to demonstrate this. It has warmed about one degree Fahrenheit—naturally—since the end of the mini-ice age in 1850.

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By Alan Caruba

The provision of electrical power nationwide has become the chosen battleground for environmental groups laboring night and day to insure there will not be enough of it to meet our needs.

The U.S. Department of Energy predicts that overall energy demand will grow by 45% between now and 2030.

The effort to insure Americans will not have enough electricity is deadly serious. Take, for example, the exultant news release (Jan 17) from the Rainforest Action Network, “Proposed Coal Plants Losing Steam” celebrating “59 coal plants cancelled or shelved in 2007.”

Since coal-fired utilities provide over 50 percent of the electricity generated in America, the need for additional plants would seem obvious. A May 2007 Business Week article about coal noted that, “Today, making electricity from coal can cost half as much as using cleaner-burning natural gas.” Half as much at the plant translates to half as much in the monthly energy bill to homeowners and others.

The Greens, however, using the utterly bogus “global warming” hoax and asserting the false notion that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will transform the climate of the earth, are successfully denying Americans electrical power.

There is no global warming and CO2 constitutes about 0.038% if the earth’s atmosphere. In past eras there was a lot more CO2 and the result was the lush vegetation that kept a lot of dinosaurs munching away for several million years.

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By Thomas E. Brewton

The experience of the Soviet Union, Japan, and China should, but will not, cause liberal activists to proceed with caution.

According to the New York Times:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said that if she became president, the federal government would take a more active role in the economy, to address what she called the excesses of the market and of the Bush administration…

Reflecting what her aides said were very different conditions today, Mrs. Clinton put her emphasis on issues like inequality and the role of institutions like government, rather than market forces, in addressing them.

The logical end of Senator Clinton's prescription was first articulated by the followers of Henri de Saint-Simon, who in 1829 addressed the following to the President of the French Chamber of Deputies:

The sole effect of [the free market place] system is to leave the distribution of social advantages to a chance few who are able to lay some pretence to it, and to condemn the numerically superior class to deprivation, ignorance, and misery. [Socialists] ask that all the instruments of production, all lands and capital, the funds now divided among individual proprietors, should be pooled so as to form one central social fund…

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By Alan Caruba

Let’s understand a simple fact. You cannot squeeze any more energy out of a gallon of gasoline than already exists. If you mix it with an additive which itself provides less energy, what you get is less energy.

So, when Congress passed a so-called energy bill in mid-December that demanded more “fuel efficiency” by a measure of forty percent, requiring that automobiles be built to get 35 miles per gallon in 2020 as opposed to the former mandate of 25 mpg, it was essentially telling American auto makers to start making cars out of paper mache or something so lightweight that the driver and passengers will have to be extracted from a crash with a sponge.

Then, too, there’s a strange notion that 300 million Americans, some of whom have been known to drive cars and trucks, are somehow going to be able to “conserve” their way to “energy independence.” You can’t save or conserve the energy in a gallon of gasoline or any other fuel. You either use it or you don’t. If you don’t use it, you better find another way to get to work or anywhere else.

Democrat Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, said the energy bill will cut demand for foreign oil and promote non-fossil fuels that will reduce greenhouse gases linked to global warming. This is worse than just being stupid, this is dangerous nonsense because (1) there is no global warming and (2) one way to reduce the importation of foreign oil is to encourage the discovery, extraction, and refining of the oil sources that are known to exist in and offshore America.

Does the new “energy bill” permit for drilling and extraction of the millions, perhaps billions, of barrels of oil in Alaska’s ANWR? No. Does the new bill encourage the exploration for oil and natural gas off the nation’s continental shelf on our vast east and west coasts? No. Did it give the oil companies any tax breaks to build the billion-dollar refineries the nation needs? No. Did it encourage the building of nuclear plants? No.

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By Frank Hyland

Food for thought.

Picture this if you will: You are on the way to a soccer game in your car with your kids and the children of neighbors in the back seat. Your SUV has been acting up and again this time the engine falters and sputters. It is running so poorly that you realize clearly that it is destined to wind up on the shoulder of the downhill side of the road, to run no more. The kids sit there disconsolately, staring out the windows, waiting for you to take some action on their behalf so that they can make it to "the game."

Now try to imagine yourself walking around to the rear of the vehicle and pushing it forward, only to realize that you and the children are approaching the edge of a cliff.

Dumb Question # 287: What do you do when you realize that the SUV is picking up speed toward the cliff’s edge? It was a trick question for anyone with more than four functioning brain cells. Of course you would do everything in your power, once you saw the danger ahead, to stop the vehicle before the children were hurt. Why, then, would anyone continue pushing your kids and others’ kids toward and over a cliff, you ask? Why, indeed.

By now you’ve figured out that the "SUV" is the federal and state programs collectively known as "entitlements," chief among them being Social Security and Medicare. Both have been the subject of repeated warnings, followed by repeated creation of commissions to investigate and recommend solutions. I would recommend, for openers, the near-term renaming of both, to become Social Insecurity and Mediscare as a means of getting the attention of those who still hope to become recipients.

In case those pushing the two programs off the cliff haven’t noticed, we’re now in the year 2008. It was one thing for proponents to put things off when we were still in the 20th Century, back in the ‘90s, and insolvency was still more than a decade away. For those who get elected every six, four, and especially for those elected every two years, that’s a lifetime and the problems can safely be "kicked down the road" for others to deal with. Depending on the date of the estimate and the source, the year of impending insolvency swings back and forth by a year or so.

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by Thomas E. Brewton

Emphatically, NO.

A reader on the Intellectual Conservative website, responding to the recent post titled Savings?, posed this query:

Let me ask a silly question: Do your Social Security contributions count as savings?

The answer is that Social Security is the polar opposite of savings.

The effect of Social Security is to decrease savings. None of the money remitted as Social Security taxes is available for individuals or businesses for real savings that could support productive investment in business expansion and create new jobs, thereby enriching the people.

As soon as Social Security taxes reach the Treasury, they are removed and replaced with non-marketable, low-interest-rate Treasury debt. The money scooped from the Social Security accounts goes straight out the door to pay Social Security beneficiaries and, if any money is left over, to pay everyday Federal operating expenses. Not a penny is invested in productive assets.

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By Alan Caruba

On December 5 some Starbucks customers in New York and Washington, D.C., two major media centers, could look up from their double lattes and see a small group of idiots dressed up as cows protesting outside their favorite bistro. Unfortunately for the protesters, the media ignored their valiant effort to advance the interests of Food and Water Watch, but good news for consumers.

Food and Water Watch is a spin-off of Ralph Nader’s anti-everything Public Citizen, a self-appointed organization famous for its opposition to modern technology, corporations, and globalization. The silly people in the silly cow costumes were, in fact a marketing ploy to frighten people into believing that milk produced by cows that have received bovine growth hormones are a threat to the health of Americans.

Nothing in the many years that bovine growth hormone has been used demonstrates any threat at all, although the protesters described it as a “cancer-related hormone.” The growth hormone is a synthetic version of the natural cow hormone, bovine somatotropin.

In this insanely over-regulated nation of ours, any hint of a cancer risk would have pulled it off the market long ago. While science confirms its safety, the theater of protest goes on.

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By Alan Caruba

Like the water in the well that goes dry, you don’t miss it until it’s gone and then it is just too late. In a society where our supermarkets overflow with food of every description, the notion that America is forcing its already small population of farmers, ranchers, and dairymen to quit must seem odd.

I was reminded of this by a recent Business Week cover story, “Can Anyone Steer This Economy?” by Michael Mandel. He began by noting that sometime next year the U.S. will hit a milestone. “For the first time in recent memory, the cost of imported goods and services will exceed federal revenues. In other words, Americans will soon pay more to foreigners than they do to their national government.”

If you like imported oil, said some sage, you will love imported food. The price of imported food involves more than one might imagine. Among the cost will be the loss of America’s wheat-growing farms, once known as the breadbasket for the world. That’s because the cost of growing wheat is exceeding the price it can get. Unless a farm bill wandering around Congress looking for a vote insures that farmers can receive a rational target price and the farmers an appropriate direct payment, they will be out of business.

As Jerry Snyder, president of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers, says, if the situation remains as it is, “all wheat growers have a chance of becoming dinosaurs. We will cease to exist.” Right now “farmers are selling out, going broke, or leaving farming altogether.”

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By Alan Caruba

The midterm elections were held on November 7^th and by November 10^th the Associated Press reported that California Senator Barbara Boxer was promising “major policy shifts on global warming, air quality and toxic-waste cleanup as she prepares to lead the U.S. Senate’s environmental committee.”

“Time is running out,” said Sen. Boxer about global warming “and we need to move forward on this,” during a conference call with reporters. Noticeably missing from her Chicken Little pronouncement was any scientific evidence that (1) there actually is a global warming threat and (2) why any of the draconian proposals to deal with it would have the slightest effect.

“Boxer said she intends to introduce legislation to curb greenhouse gases, strengthen environmental laws regarding public health and hold oversight hearings on federal plans to clean up Superfund hazardous waste sites across the country.”

I call this the “Californication” of the economy because Sen. Boxer would model federal legislation on a new California law that imposed the first statewide limit on greenhouse gases, seeking to cut that State’s emissions by 25 percent in an effort to return them to 1990 levels by 2020.

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(Alexandria, VA) — The Democratic Party's "New Direction for America" might attempt to steer government toward a sounder financial footing, but its course leads to $79.1 billion in new annual federal spending, according to a line-by-line analysis by the non-partisan National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF). Among the findings:

• Health care represented the largest spending category at $28.8 billion, or 36 percent of the total agenda. Within this category, Democrats proposed to "fix the Medicare prescription drug program," which would cost $29.5 billion annually. The plan did call for spending cuts amounting to just over $1 billion, in order to "end wasteful giveaways to drug companies."
• Veterans care was high on the list as well, at $19.8 billion. The initiative to launch a "G.I. Bill of Rights for the 21st Century" would provide increased pay, health care, and other benefits for veterans and their families. This program would increase outlays by $99 billion over 5 years, and would be offset by increasing the top income tax rate.
• Education spending, at $16.2 billion, represented approximately 20 percent of the total net agenda. The Democratic plan called for increasing the maximum individual Pell Grant to $5,100 ($4.0 billion in total annual spending), recruit science and math teachers ($3.7 billion yearly), and reduce college loan interest rates ($7.4 billion annually), among other items.
• Yet another proposal called for an "AmeriSave" account system that would establish a dollar-for-dollar federal match for the first $1,000 contributed to a personal retirement plan. This initiative would cost taxpayers roughly $7.5 billion each year.

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