by Paul Driessen Wishful thinking guides today’s federal energy policymakers. The Obama administration is now exploring ways to exert control over hydraulic fracturing technology that has increased U.S. petroleum production — despite federal leasing and drilling delays and moratoriums — even though the states have successfully regulated the practice for decades.
The administration lavishes billions of taxpayer dollars on sun, wind, wave, algae and cornfield energy that they hype and hope will replace fossil fuels. They ignore health and environmental laws in order to green-light these favored technologies, overlooking killed birds and bats, the impact to scenic and wildlife habitats, and harm to people’s well-being from wind turbines, rising energy costs and high unemployment resulting from their actions.
Other policies tilt the playing field against sources they fear and loathe, especially hydrocarbons that provide 83 percent of all U.S. energy, versus 2 percent for biofuel and 1.4 percent for wind and solar.
Whereas renewable energy schemes and scams require tens of billions in annual taxpayer and consumer subsidies, hydrocarbons generate millions of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars annually in royalties, taxes and economic activity. Yet the administration continues to throw senseless obstacles in the path of fossil fuel production and hinder proposals for a pipeline that would carry Canadian oil to American refineries.
Innovative private companies perfected new fracking techniques in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas and Louisiana, where the federal government ownership of land varies from 2 percent to 5 percent. That would have been impossible in our 13 Western states, where the feds own 30 percent of Montana and 85 percent of Nevada.
Fracking drove U.S. natural gas prices down to $3.20 per thousand cubic feet (or million Btu) today — versus a high of $14 in 2008, and more than $14 in Europe and Japan today. This has yielded cheaper electricity for homes, businesses and hospitals, fuel for natural gas-powered vehicles, and feed stocks for petrochemicals. It also translates into competitive advantages and more jobs, economic productivity and tax revenues.
By raising interminable objections to safe, proven technologies, radical environmentalists and the Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency hope to raise production costs and prices of fossil fuels. This, they hope, will increase oil and gas prices, making wind, solar and biofuel energy more competitive — albeit at the expense of jobs, economic growth and tax revenues.
Energy policy is about choosing among imperfect sources of power to support modern societies and living standards. No source of energy, anywhere, anytime, has zero environmental impacts or risks.
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