Something for which to blame Obama
Bookworm on Nov 10 2008 at 8:00 pm | Filed under: Barack Obama
One post ago, I said I was going to wait and see until Obama does something before I get upset. Now I’m upset. I got around to reading the AP article announcing that one of Obama’s first acts will be to reinstate the ban on offshore and natural gas drilling. That’s the ban that, when in place, saw our gasoline soar to almost $4.00 per gallon. That wasn’t just a hit to every person driving a car. It was a hit to every school district running buses. It was a hit to every grocery store getting food to the shelves. It was a hit to every farm using gasoline powered equipment to harvest food. It was a hit to every flight moving people around the United States and around the world. And on and on, throughout the American economy, at every level and affecting every person.
That same ban was also a huge blessing to OPEC en masse, as well as to its individual members. It also made Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Russia and Venezuela very, very happy. Just as the ban was a bad thing for us at every point in our economy, it was a blessing for those who loath us.
And what happened when Bush let the offshore oil drilling ban lapse in the face of a Democratic Congress afraid to jink the election? Prices plummeted, and quickly too. Even here, in one of the priciest parts of America, you can now get gasoline for less then $2.00 a gallon if you’re willing to drive a few miles from the pricier sections of Marin. My local Safeway has sales on everything. As their shipping costs have dropped, they’re racing to pass the savings on to customers. It’s not beneficence on Safeway’s part. It’s good business. If they can drop their prices faster than their competitors can, they get the customers.
And just as we in America are benefiting hugely from the mere possibility of offshore drilling, the oil producing nations, almost all of which are hostile to us, are worried. OPEC is talking about price fixing to keep those petrodollars flowing into Wahhabi coffers.
So what’s Barack Obama’s first planned move? As I said above, it’s to reinstate the offshore oil ban, as well as to kill domestic natural gas production! I kid you not:
President-elect Barack Obama plans to use his executive powers to make an immediate impact when he takes office, perhaps reversing Bush administration policies on stem cell research and domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.
[snip]
On drilling, the federal Bureau of Land Management is opening about 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling. Bush administration officials argue that the drilling will not harm sensitive areas; environmentalists oppose it.
“They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah,” Podesta said. “I think that’s a mistake.”
Clearly, one of the things we as conservatives can do is remind hurting consumers every single day that it was President Bush who made gas prices (and therefore all prices) drop when he allowed the ban to lapse, and President Obama who made every aspect of our lives more costly.
And if, God forbid, some Wahhabi extremists launch a deadly, well-funded attack against the U.S. in 2009, it’s up to us to remind the American people that it was the extremist environmental policies espoused by the Democrats (Obama included) that funded that ideology and those attacks.
I was hoping that Obama would govern as a centrist, given his narcissistic need to retain power and popularity. He’s making it clear, though, that he will govern as an ideologue, pandering to the base, and to hell with the best interests of America and her citizens.
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If I understand it correctly, Obama is going to reverse an executive order that was going to allow drilling in Utah.
From an AP story:
Whoops!
Nothing like repeating old news. It must be my bifocals.
I’d love to get the complete list of those “hundreds” of Barack Obama Executive Orders that a team of his advisors have been preparing for months.
These Executive Orders are going to start raining down upon us like a storm of baseball-sized hail beginning January 21st. You can try to run from them, but there will be nowhere to hide. If only we could prepare the ground in advance, actually reach the American people and warn them of everything that is coming!
And the storm of executive orders will be only the beginning…
Book said,
>> the AP article announcing that one of Obama’s first acts will be to reinstate the ban on offshore and natural gas drilling >>
I forgot to add, that is only one of the executive orders. One among the hundreds that the “Obama Executive Order Advisory Team” been creating.
Book:
One part of narcissism is its inability to relate to reality. In many ways it’s the sibling of solipsism — If I am the center of the world, why shouldn’t the world be the product of my imagination?
You and I, and Mike, and Brian, and Bob, and Deana, and suek and the rest of the good regulars here know how self-defeating a ban on offshore drilling will be. That’s because we’re rooted in reality: scarcity = higher prices.
Obama does not operate in that world. The “right” thing to do is to protect the environment so that wealthy whites can continue to enjoy their pristine ocean views. “Right” trumps reality.
Now, if I were a cynic or a Machiavellian, I might say that Obama is two steps ahead of us all: 1.) He pleases his rabid base by closing off exploration then 2.) when the chickens come home to roost, he looks at his base and shrugs his shoulders (“What can I do? It’s an emergency!”) and then shows what a great, open-minded pragmatist he is by moving to the center and modifying the ban.
I was with you, CharlesM, until you started grasping at straws in that last paragraph.
Danny, sorry. I was sucking at the straw labeled, “I Believe You, Lucy, That You’re Going to Hold the Football for Me.”
Because of the economic situation, a reinstatement of the drilling ban may not have much *immediate* effect on oil & nat gas prices. But as any major economies in the world begin to improve, demand will pick up and so will price.
Reinstatement of the drilling ban will also have an effect on business location decisions: for example, petrochemical businesses that have been of the fence about moving operations to somewhere with cheaper oil & nat gas (viz Saudi Arabia) are likely to be pushed over to the “move” side.
I continue to be particularly concerned about electricity supply and prices: With the hostility to nuclear, coal, and even hydro, just about the only kind of large-scale supply you can bring on-line is nat gas fired. And with the suppression of drilling, combined with additional demand from the electrical industry, nat gas prices will head up and, with them, the price per kilowatt-hour paid by every home and business in America.
It’s interesting that the high gas prices were used to beat Bush on the head were affected so much by this ban that lapsed. I noticed the drop in gas prices as well, and I wondered what made that happen. It was right after a pipeline went down from a refinery due to the recent hurricane, too.
This is amazing.
The poor and the middle class will wind up feeling this the most . . . the very people whose lives Obama promised would improve if he were elected.
Some poor and middle class people need to be interviewed now and asked, “How much are you paying for gas?” and “How has this affected your budget?”
Then a nice, prominent graph needs to be made that shows the price of oil and natural gas before the ban lapsed, what happened after it lapsed, and what happens when it is reinstated should Obama do that when he becomes president.
And when the price goes up, we need to go back and find those same people, show them the graph and ask them those same two questions. And, because we need to make this as simple and straightforward as possible, “Do you prefer the price you are paying for gas now or do you prefer the price you were paying for gas in November when the offshore drilling ban was no longer in force?”
People simply must understand how susceptible the economy is to cause and effect. They need to understand why artificially limiting access to goods, taxing things and, as Obama called it one interview, “sending price signals” really wind up hurting the poor and middle class, not the rich.
Deana
Obama may move to the center on some issues.
This won’t be one of them.
Folks who have bought into anthropogenic global warming are true believers and like all fanatics, they are not open to reason. This may be Obama’s achilles heel, since in their drive to eliminate fossil fuels, they may drive energy prices to the point of economic collapse.
I believe the left would never forgive him for abandoning or even compromising on green energy.
This is Obama’s energy plan from his campaign website. Do you see any energy production in the plan? It is all based on conservation and a move to alternate energy.
• Provide short‐term relief to American families facing pain at the pump
• Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.
• Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined
• Put 1 million Plug‐In Hybrid cars – cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon – on the road by 2015, cars that we will work to make sure are built here in America
• Ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025
• Implement an economy‐wide cap‐and‐trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050
In 2007 we consumed 4,160 billion Kw hours of electricity. We produced 32.7 billion Kw hours from solar and wind. In the renewable energy column we have hydroelectric which produced 250 billion Kw hours.
Obama’s plan calls for 1,000 billion Kw hours from renewables in 17 years. Hydroelectric will remain static, since environmentalists oppose any new hydro projects. That means we have to increase wind and solar production by 25% each year for the next 17 years. And this assumes total electrical needs don’t rise, but if we move cars from fossil fuels to electricity, we will need additional capacity for transportation.
We’ll see how much people really want a green energy policy when prices escalate and shortages become the norm (I guess Californians are already used to rolling brownouts).
Can it be done? I think it would be easier to put a man on the moon in 10 years using a commodore computer than this.
It will require the democrats to change environmental policy and limit the left’s opposition to new energy production (even green energy).
Deana:
What Obama and the left are gambling on is economic illiteracy. If gas prices rise, all that The One will have to say is, “Greedy producers are gouging us. What would you say if we partially nationalize the oil industry or hit it with some windfall taxes?”
Given the credulity that helped many people vote for Obama, I would not be surprised if that tack works.
The drawback for Obama, of course, is that you can only pull a Chavez for so long; that is to say, goosing the golden goose so many times that you have to pretend your hand up its arse is really a thermometer for giving it vitamins and monitoring its health.
If there is anything that this election and the Fannie Mae /Freddy Mac debacle have taught me, it is that causative connections are of absolutely no interest to the majority of the electorate. Right now, they prefer to vent the emotional baggage of their lives, and the more outlandish the presumed target of their venting, the better.
I am afraid that CharlesM is right…whether it is global warming, greedy corporatists or ChimpyMcHitlerMcBurton Bush, people are looking for fantastical scapegoats for their emotional anxieties, not facts. They are looking for emotional gratification.
In 10 minutes, I was able to explain the cause of the banking crisis to the high-school educated, middle-of-the-road, conservative democrat lady who cuts my hair. She genuinely got it. Not so the Liberal members of my family – I saw the lights winking out as soon as I began explaining, step-by-step and fact-by-fact, why Bush and McCain had not been responsible for the debacle. The information just did not fit within their templates, so it did not compute.
My prediction is that, the worse things get, the more frantically people will flail in search of scapegoats to sacrifice rather than confronting true causes. “Republicans”, “Conservatives” and “Christians” and especially “Bush” will do quite well in this regards, thank you. This is why I fear that problems won’t get fixed and will instead get far worse under this administration.
People believe the nonsense they do today because they want to believe it. Arguing “facts” won’t do the trick. I fear that the Age of Reason is about to be supplanted by the Age of Ideology: facts will be culled from consideration unless they fit or can be fitted within an idealogical template. I believe that most of us recognize that this is what has been going on in the long threads with Ozzie.
Bottom line, I worry that basing our responses to the current unfolding debacle on “facts” is a losing proposition. I wish I knew a better approach. Would re-inspiring people on the joys and responsibilities of lost “freedoms” work better?
Danny…I fear that the Age of Reason is about to be supplanted by the Age of Ideology”…see Koestler on closed systems.
David Foster – excellent link! Hits the nail on the head for much of what has transpired these last eight years…and for what is to come.
This discussion of drilling bans fits into a comment I made to my wife yesterday. I wonder if a Governor has ever sued to reclaim lands within the state boundaries from the federal government?
We seem to accept without question the fact that the government owns huge swaths of land within the various states. In Virginia alone, the National Forests encompass a huge percentage of the land mass. Most of it is used for nothing. Out west it is even more pronounced. Why? In this Republic which was designed on the concept of Federalism, how did the federals come away with so much of the land and resources?
It is my belief that these public lands–with the attendant mineral rights– should revert to the states except for land actually used by the federal government for such necessities as militray bases. The states would be compensated for that use of course.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Sarah Palin controlled the mineral rights to ANWR? I think I will write her a letter. She has the guts and the motivation to take them on.
(Unfortunately, any lawsuit would drag on long past my lifespan. Wouldn’t it Book?)
We still have Dec.1 to wait for…and then Dec. !6.
Phil Berg’s case asking for Obama’s eligibility to be determined has been denied in the Supreme Court, but the Court has required paperwork concerning his eligibility to be submitted by Dec. 1. Birth Certificate, for sure…I don’t know what other papers, since the question of his eligibility doesn’t rest entirely on the place of his birth and his parents’ status. * As I understand it – and I’m not sure I do – the court could reinstate the case if the required paperwork is not submitted.
I assume that if the Court found that he was not eligible, they would so inform the Electoral College, which has to vote on the 16th. The comment was made that it would not be advisable for Obama to stiff the court as he has the lower courts – the Supremes wouldn’t take that lightly and could reinstate the case.
My mind runs across all sorts of possibilities here – none of them especially happy. My husband says they’ll give him a pass no matter what they find, because “the people have spoken”. I’ve read elsewhere that even the most liberal judges still consider themselves the guardians of the Constitution, and are unlikely to overlook direct conflicts with the basic amendments. I can’t get past the fact, myself, that if he is found to be ineligibile, he has known it, and proceeded regardless. How can he possibly take an oath to “protect and defend” when he will already have deliberately have defied it?
Or maybe they’ll just find out that it’s all just so much smoke and everything is hunkydory. I almost wish that they do. I fear the outcome if they don’t – as much as I might wish for it.
*There are now allegations of possibly different fathers. Putting aside the implications of that, it raises yet another question – if you have a biological parent who is a citizen, but a legal parent who is not, which determines citizenship? You can’t just allege that parentage, you’d have to DNA prove it, I’d think. Wow. The possibilities and ramifications of what must have seemed like a very personal choice!!!
Another problem with wind or solar is the intermittent nature. Wind generators seldom run above 30% of capacity and can operate in a wind envelope between 10 and 50 mph, depending on design. Maximum output occurs around 33 mph which is a force 7 wind for you sailors, and you’ve double reefed by then. We still need a backup source of generation- probably diesel or gas.
Don’t get me wrong, I think wind energy should be part of our energy future.
But during this last housing boom, did we think in terms of energy efficiency (I mean in terms other than super-insulation? Did we think in terms of passive solar for heating and natural vegetation for cooling? Ground water heat pumps? Solar heat for hot water? All of these things drive up the cost of construction, but maybe as an energy policy we should have made these elements part of construction and reduced the size of the houses. What this will lead to is the realization that houses are shelters first, and investments second.
And I still believe the government should provide incentives for these policies rather than dictate them. That’s what tax policy is all about– encourage a certain action and discourage another.
While we are building these new energy farms (which still have to deal with the inefficiencies of the tansmission grids) we should be applying techniques to residental and commercial facilities. Co-generation- wherever heat is produced in a manufacturing process we should apply small scale electrical generation.
And whether we like it or not, the greenies are now in control. As long as they don’t drive us off the cliff, weaning ourselves from foreign oil sources needs to be a priority as important as the Manhattan Project. And I don’t consider Canada a foreign source of oil– since they are our #1 supplier.
Crude Oil Imports (Top 15 Countries)
(Thousand Barrels per Day)
Country Aug-08
CANADA 1,833
SAUDI ARABIA 1,533
MEXICO 1,292
VENEZUELA 1,146
NIGERIA 1,035
IRAQ 663
Suek,
Is it absolutely certain they are requiring a birth certificate.
It seems to me this would require them to act if it turns out he is not natural born.
You know, ignorance is bliss.
Interesting.
Here’s an interesting idea for states on the coast. One thing you never see is an estimate of cost per Kwh.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/16/windpower.renewableenergy
Whoops! In post #11 all those figures are Megawatt hours, not Kilowatt hours.
About that oil… Our future if we don’t start producing our own energy?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1084335/Beware-Saudi-deal-help-bail-Britain-It-comes-devastating-IOU.html
About all that free wind energy…
http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2008/11/domestic-wind-turbines-net-user-of.html
People believe the nonsense they do today because they want to believe it. Arguing “facts” won’t do the trick. I fear that the Age of Reason is about to be supplanted by the Age of Ideology: facts will be culled from consideration unless they fit or can be fitted within an idealogical template. I believe that most of us recognize that this is what has been going on in the long threads with Ozzie.
They are the perfect targets of propaganda, Danny. However, I believe that anyone with a sufficient skill level in the arts of propaganda can convince these people of anything: whether you use what they want to believe or what they fear to believe.
Just like when Europe discarded Christianity, their people started converting to Islam faster and faster. In a vacuum, anybody new that comes in will fill it. What this means is that you had better put up a contest.
These people are just tools; they will believe whatever they are told is true. However, we are operating at a propaganda disadvantage since the enemy’s propaganda got to them first. We will require a psychological shock of sufficient level that it will break through the mental defenses erected by the propaganda of our opponents.
OUr disadvantage is that honest people don’t tend to like using deception or propaganda. People want the moral high ground if they can get it. They prefer it and those that believe in God or religion will prefer it even more, even though the fake liberals are lying on this score.
Unless people come up with a sufficient counter-propaganda campaign (like a campaign in war), it will be hard to turn people to our cause and disaggregate them from their allies.
The Sunnis of Al Anbar, for example, needed the shock of seeing AQ operate before they started to change their minds or listen to us. This, however, was not planned by the US military. It was just something that happened because the US military could not secure Iraq. I believe that you can get a better solution out of things if you don’t wait until they implode.
With the election of Obama, however, we are forced into waiting for the Sunnis to change their minds. Bush may have been saved by Petraeus in Iraq, but nobody saved Bush in America.
suek,
Post #22,
read the comment section of your link. Wind can have a net benefit. It all depends on what the cost of production is for the alternative.
Certain areas could benefit from wind. The closer the turbines are to end user the more likely they will have a net benefit.
Here’s a website that lists the hidden costs of wind since there are currently large subsidies to wind production. It is obvious that wind will only be supplemental and that’s evident by Obama’s plan to provide 25% of electric production from renewables. That may be the maximum supplement possible given the intermittent nature.
http://www.mnforsustain.org/windpower_schleede_costs_of_electricity.htm
Break the global warmists into three groups.
Those that believe we’re causing global warming, but are pragmatists.
And those that are believers, but also believe that capitalism is dead or dying. These folks don’t care what the effect of green energy policy on the economy, in fact they hope it takes the economy down.
And the majority of folks that have their head in the sand, and hope everything turns out all right.
We need to appeal to the former, which means the argument must always include first the move toward renewables, and additional fossil fuel production as the bridge, since the 10 or 15 year transition figure cited by the green energy crowd isn’t realistic.
This website attempts to analyze the true costs of energy.
BrianE:
I read after to 9-11 that reactor facilities are built to sustain direct 600 mph hits by fully fueled 747s without being breached.
I’ll head off and see if I can provide a reliable link.
Even if that level of reactor sturdiness turns out to be true, I’m certain that raising the specter of 9-11 is one of those counter-arguments to nukes we’ll be running into routinely as the debate over power sources heats up.
Charles and Danny –
The more I think about it, the more I believe that your responses in #12 and #13 are close to the truth.
Many (not all) of the people who voted for Obama did so because they were not willing to stop and consider facts and engage in serious reasoning. If I had a dime for every Obama voter who explained his or her support for him by saying “Well, we just need some change, I think” I’d be able to bail out the auto industry and spare the American taxpayer from that expense.
I have to say this: I have this tight feeling in my stomach. I don’t want the Obama presidency to be a disaster because it will mean America will suffer. I’m not hoping for him to be a failure.
But when reasoning and facts are considered optional or viewed as impediments to “progress” by (guess who?) the progressives, then how do we keep from sinking into darkness?
I don’t know. I would love to think that people could be inspired by reminding them of the joys and responsibilities of lost “freedoms” but I suspect that the term “responsibilities” is being co-opted by those progressives to mean something different from what most of us here think it means.
Deana
>>Wind can have a net benefit. >>
I believe that…I believe that the report was about individual home type windmills. They’re selling those now to put on your roof. In fact, I received some of those postcard advertising packages that offered a new version called an eggbeater or some such. Apparently the originals had something like 6 ft diameter blades, and the new ones about only about 3 ft.
We (my husband’s family) own some land in Colorado. It’s in the landbank at the moment, but we were approached by someone wanting to lease about one acre for a windmill to generate power. The terms were good, so apparently _someone_ thinks they’ll make a profit. It could be just the incentives the government will pay, but since they’re talking about each mill costing in the range of 1mil, I doubt it. It looks like actual construction is several years out – in fact, I think all we contracted for at this point is an option. I don’t know for sure…
There *may* be good things happening in the technology of “very small nuclear reactors”. This article is the best one I’ve run across so far on this emerging technology.
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/atomic/
“Soft Energy Paths” by Amory Lovins is an older book but describes some of these benefits of small-scale energy production.
I believe in nuclear technology, and it ain’t solely because I like thermonukes either.
Small-scale energy production can be grouped and made huge.
I’m not so sure about T. Boone Pickens’ wind farms in the Texs panhandle, as has been noted the wind comes and goes.
But the sun’s out pretty much every day in some places. We have a pre-existing line drawn in this country, and it’s drawn pretty closely to where the sun is mostly visible.
A good step would be to require every building in the country along or south of route 40 to be fitted with solar panels. You start, obviously, with the government (at all levels) buildings: courthouses, city halls, jails, firehouses, schools, libraries, police stations, highway departments, airports, departments of health, etc. Thousands of buildings go off the grid right there.
Next step is give businesses some tax breaks to live up to the newly-imposed requirement that they do the same: every factory, every office building, every Wal-Mart, every shoe-store – off the grid.
Then tax breaks for individuals, and we retrofit every house, and mandate that every new one built be equipped with solar panels.
Building appropriate storage for all the power produced would be difficult, so you might not even bother with that. But: if you can get a third of the country off the grid for a twelve hour sunny day, every sunny day; then even if they all go back on the grid at sundown you’ve still saved an enormous amount of oil that didn’t get burned generating electricity, and didn’t pollute anything in the process of being burned.
You could start doing this this afternoon.