In the classic novel Don Quixote, the dreamer-protagonist battles against what he believes – or imagines – to be hulking, dangerous giants.
Windmills. He was tilting at windmills.
Environmental extremists, working in concert with leftists at the highest levels of government, are now doing exactly the opposite.
They are hoping on windmills.
In light of gas prices soaring to over $4 a gallon, President Obama has given voice to what he claims to be an energy strategy of “all of the above,” which roughly translated means doing anything to lower the costs and reduce American dependence on foreign oil.
Those are the words. How about the actions to back them up?
New EPA regulations proposed just last week would effectively eliminate coal as a future source of energy. They would signal the end of new coal-fired power plants, even though America has more coal reserves than any nation on earth. Already, the coal industry in SW Virginia has been profoundly crippled.
Fine, you say. Coal presents large environmental hazards and should be phased out in favor of natural gas, which will be in plentiful supply thanks to new fracking and horizontal drilling innovations that have been a boon to natural gas discovery and production. But environmentalists and their leftist cohorts have gone to the mat opposing fracking.
After three years of study, the Keystone pipeline, which would produce almost one million barrels of oil a day, was ready for what should have been a no-brainer affirmative decision for the president. No. In fact, Mr. Obama didn’t stop at refusing to approve the pipeline. He actively lobbied against it.
Well, certainly we can extract the plentiful supplies of oil off the coasts of Virginia and Louisiana. No and no. Too risky, even though we’ve been tapping these sources for decades. (though a limited number of oil leases will be granted off Virginia starting six years from now)
OK, then, we could certainly explore the north slope of Alaska in the postage-stamp sized parcel of land known as ANWAR. No again (though the administration did approve development of a now largely tapped-out series of Alaskan oil fields. Thanks for that).
So now that the left has affirmed that none of these readily available strategies that would demonstrably create more plentiful, reliable and cheap sources of energy are acceptable, what?
Well, their immediate answer is to demonize the oil industry by eliminating their subsidies, notwithstanding Mr. Obama’s support for same when he was in the Senate. This is a sure-fire way to raise gas prices even higher as the industry compensates for lost revenue.
Then there are those electric cars, which of course rely largely on soon-to-be-defunct coal-fired power to charge.
There is solar power, still so expensive that it is years, if not decades, away from affordability.
And then of course, there are windmills.
Windmills create a tiny fraction of the power produced by conventional energy sources, and like those electric cars, require a back-up power source since they are so unreliable and utterly dependent on windy weather.
But all of this should not be surprising. The Secretary of Energy has said publicly (though he tried recently to recant) that he favors far higher gas prices, like Europe, where they are paying around $10 a gallon.
This is not Europe, as much as leftists would like it to be. Of course, we can see right before our eyes the deep damage policies such as these have created in Utopian Europe, where one country after another founders on the brink of bankruptcy.
The fact is that, like it or not, America wants and needs cheap, plentiful and readily available supplies of energy, and that is as it should be for a highly productive nation.
This requires, at a bare minimum, swooping up the low-hanging energy fruit to prepare for the decades ahead, in which we will continue to rely on oil and other traditional energy sources. We can leave “green” energy to the free market, with generous incentives for entrepreneurs to bring renewable energy to market when it becomes viable and affordable.
The alternative being presented by the left is no alternative at all. Hoping on windmills will fall so short of the mark as to make America a second-rate nation.
