by Steve Forbes
Wealthy individuals including Tom Steyer and others are
driving an effort to effectively “short sell” the American economy by
attacking oil, natural gas and coal producers while touting the benefits
of “green” energy resources that are still unreliable or are
contributing minuscule amounts of power to our nation’s energy demands.
For those who are unfamiliar with investing, “shorting” a
stock means that an investor who thinks a stock will go down in price
will borrow shares of that stock from a brokerage firm and then sell
those shares. If that stock does indeed go down, the speculator can buy
it at a lower price and make money. Short-sellers love to see stocks
they target suffer big declines in their prices.
“Shorting” is exactly the strategy of many well-funded,
radical environmentalists who are targeting our traditional energy
producers and our manufacturing base while supporting a “green energy”
agenda that cannot survive in a free market without huge government
subsidies — our tax dollars — to buttress them. The agenda of many of
these wealthy activist donors is to target and eventually take down our
fossil fuel industry. That is simply a recipe for disaster.
Sure, it sounds great to talk about conserving energy and reducing
carbon and other emissions. But the inconvenient truth is that the
United States is presently at a near 30-year low in carbon emissions. No
wonder: our energy producers spent $90 billion to develop zero and low
carbon technologies between 2000 and 2014.
The Tom Steyers of the world want to ignore that we all benefit from a
healthy U.S. energy industry. Domestic energy production — oil and
natural gas — is now saving the average U.S. household $360 annually.
Further, our fossil fuel industry has been one of the few bright spots
in our lagging economy. Oil and natural gas industry jobs increased 40
percent between 2007 and 2013 even while the U.S. economy weakened,
declining three percent.
We enjoy enhanced national security through domestic energy
production. This and reasonable U.S. energy prices promote job growth
with some one hundred new manufacturing plants planned by 2018.
Yet those who work actively to stifle U.S. energy production are
clearly getting the president’s attention as well as leaders of the
Democratic Party. We have watched the president in the waning months of
his term empower agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency,
the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, and others,
to move forward with a plague of new environmental regulations governing
carbon, methane and ozone emissions that will require oil, natural gas
and coal producers to pay costly fines or shut down.
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