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Cost Of Energy High? Don’t Ask, Politicians Don’t Tell

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April 18, 2008

About This Editor: I am a writer. Have been writing for other sites, but expect to do most of my future work HERE! My expertise extends from the esoteric such as burning hydrogen to the unpredictability of the stock market and my writing makes me a jack of all trades and exasperated master of none. I have had some influence over national wildfire and water policy and there are hints of a change in energy policy, BUT as Samuel Goldwyn once said, "A verbal promise is not worth the paper it is written on."

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The price of crude oil has gone past one hundred ten dollars a barrel on the commodities exchange. A few stories are predicting it will shoot for one hundred twenty-five dollars a barrel.

Why so expensive? You’d think that Washington would have come up with a permanent, cost effective solution at seventy dollars a barrel or even eighty dollars to stem the drain of money. But, nooo, they haven’t. Politicians in Washington are not worried. Past schemes like burning coal and stashing oil in a reserve for bad times have gotten them re-elected time and time again so why give up on a good patronage approach of promising people something for nothing but, in fact, doing nothing.

On the other hand, the national energy supply situation is not getting any better. Just recently the Governor of New York cancelled a project to deliver large amounts of liquid natural gas to the state. John McCain wants to cut the tax on gasoline to make it cheaper to drive. The Democratic New York State Assembly recently refused to vote on a plan to reduce driving in Manhattan, New York City’s main drag, by charging what was called a congestion pricing fee, increasing the cost of using a car in the main business district and raising money to subsidize alternatives in mass transit.

Add to this weak oil production as exemplified by aging fields in Russia, Mexico and elsewhere, increasing world demand tied to the growing international economy and a weak dollar and you can see where this is going.

A check of Barack Obama’s campaign web site repeats a lot of old energy slogans including energy independence. The same holds true for Hillary Clinton’s site. John McCain, for his part, is emphasizing the environment, as if that is going to increase fuel supplies and make the consumer’s purchasing price lower.

I might point out that, in this light, it is no wonder that there have been ethical questions raised about certain candidates. John McCain wants to beat down the perception he was a part of the Keating Five. Senator Obama appears to have been too friendly to a Chicago businessman named Antoin Rezko and Hillary Clinton’s ethics are the stuff of legend as numerous Republican investigations have made clear. I am still awaiting developments in the Norman Hsu story.

Now President Bush is talking, once again, about nuclear power and coal and capping greenhouse gases. What happened to those non-polluting hydrogen powered fuel cells? In comparison, Iceland is now using hydro power to create hydrogen gas and using that as car fuel. You can check it out yourself.

So it is no wonder that the oil bulls are running with impunity. They have nothing to fear from the current motley crew except empty rhetoric.

This leads to the simple conclusion that American energy policy is a fraud and the worst appears yet to come, as if there is anything worse than fantastic nonsense in a material universe that needs real world solutions.