Squaring the Culture

A leading Congressional Democrat finally acknowledged what we all intuitively understood about the Democrats’ position on energy: they will never allow more drilling of oil, nor mining of coal. The admission came from Senator Harry Reid (D, NV) yesterday on Fox News. Watch him:

Ed Morrissey skewers this precisely:

That would be great, except that no other mass-market solutions exist. Even nuclear power would take several years to implement, and Reid opposes nuclear. He wants wind and solar, even though neither have mass-production capabilities and we still haven’t solved the storage problem for alternative-sourced electricity. He thinks that we’d be better off without energy at all, rather than “making us sick” by producing coal and oil to meet current demands.

Feel like surrendering and having our economy redeploy over an event horizon to satisfy this Luddite? Vote Democratic and watch your energy bills keep skyrocketing — or vote Republican and get a sane energy policy instead.

Note that Morrissey’s objection is valid whether you agree with Reid’s assessment or not. The Democrats’ plan seems to be simply to sit on our hands and allow energy prices to fly upwards (blaming it meanwhile on Republicans) until they pass the price point at which alternative sources actually become usable. And don’t be fooled by that; these alternative sources, the best of which cannot produce more than about 2% of our electrical needs within the next 10 years, won’t reduce the price of energy, they’ll leave it at the high level it’s reached by that time — until technological improvements bring the price down. In other words, short-circuiting the oil and coal industries does not speed up the process of developing alternatives, it just starts using them before they’re economically viable.

It’s never been sane for the Democrats to encourage the development of alternatives by artificially increasing the price of what we use. Major US firms have been diligently researching alternatives for decades. Municipalities and businesses can buy fuel cell power generating plants today for local power needs. Private citizens can buy electric cars, or hydrogen fuel cell cars, today, if they like; prototypes are available. Those developments took place without needing government prompting. No artificial price increases were required, because everybody knows the fossil fuel economy won’t last forever.

The Democrat’s Luddite approach to energy rests on two, outright fallacies: first, that humans are going to destroy the planet by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere; and second, that US firms are conspiring to keep alternative energy sources off the market. It’s becoming increasingly certain that the former is false; the latter is the product of demented, conspiracy theories. These are not ideas on which a sane energy policy can be based.