If American voters are disgruntled about fuel and electricity prices, they should look in their mirrors. These prices have been determined entirely by the politicians whom they have sent to Washington - politicians who now want voters to believe that oil companies, futures speculators, Arab producers, Chinese consumers, and natural resource shortages are responsible.
Moreover, these politicians are increasingly promoting the false claim that Americans should not use energy anyway because this is bad for the planet. Of all the current contenders for the Presidential nominations of both parties, only two - Ron Paul and Fred Thompson - have failed to parrot this idiot brainchild of Al Gore and the United Nations.
Useful forms of energy are the currency of technological progress. All technology depends upon energy. Prosperity depends upon inexpensive energy. The only technologies that can currently produce inexpensive and abundant energy are nuclear and hydrocarbon power - technologies developed primarily in the United States. Yet, at current prices, Americans are importing more than $500 billion in energy each year and are also burdened with high military expenditures designed to maintain access to that imported energy.
As a result of these imports, the moguls of other countries - governed mostly by people and institutions hostile to the American way of life - hold trillions of dollars worth of claims against the assets of the people of the United States.
This situation is not the result of failures of government energy production efforts. The U.S government does not produce energy. Energy is produced by private enterprise. Why then has energy production thrived abroad while domestic production has stagnated?
This stagnation has been caused by United States government taxation, regulation, and sponsorship of litigation, which has made the U.S. a very unfavorable place to produce energy. Moreover, the U.S. government has spent vast sums of tax money subsidizing inferior energy technologies for political purposes.
The Wall Street Journal recently estimated that 381 nuclear power plants are in design or construction throughout the world, yet not one nuclear power plant has been constructed in the United States in more than 30 years.
United States hydrocarbon resources are vast. Untapped U.S. oil and gas resources are enormous, and the U.S. also has 25% of the world’s coal. Coal, oil, and gas are interchangeable. For example, coal can be liquefied at costs far below current world oil prices. The liquid hydrocarbon fuel available from American coal reserves exceeds the crude oil reserves of the entire world.
Yet the U.S. government has heavily taxed energy industries and placed so many onerous restrictions on new nuclear and hydrocarbon power production that very little development has occurred for two generations. To make up for this, our politicians have decided to require by law that the American food supply be liquefied and burned for fuel. While this ethanol debacle has not provided a significant increase in fuel, it has purchased lots of votes in the farm states - and doubled world grain prices, which are now gradually doubling American food prices.
Our political representatives have, however, an ace in the hole. The web site of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing is - this is no joke, look it up - Americans, you see, do not have to make things anymore, so they will need less energy. The other people in the world - who are producing their own energy - will make everything we need and send it to us. We send them the output of our government money factory in return.
Actually, much of America’s printing is now being outsourced to China, Columbia, and other countries where the printing industries are not being taxed and regulated into bankruptcy. These places offer much lower printing prices and even un-recycled paper.
The logical final step in increased productivity is to outsource money printing to the Chinese, too. They can then manufacture useful goods; manufacture money; pay themselves with the money; and send the goods to us. The sequel, however, is that they then can use this money to buy our remaining assets - while, of course, beneficently allowing us to continue to enjoy the advantages of our Constitutional republic.
Among President Bush’s first actions when assuming office in 2002 was the convening of meetings of energy production experts. Following their advice, the President developed a plan for stimulating a rebirth of American nuclear and hydrocarbon power development. This plan - with minor exceptions - has gone nowhere, as a result of opposition in the U.S. Congress.
Just outside Phoenix, Arizona is the Palo Verde nuclear power station. Cooled by waste water from the city of Phoenix, this power station was the American nuclear power industry’s final effort. The building of Palo Verde was stopped, by mythical politically-motivated fear about nuclear safety, with only three reactors completed. Similar merchants of fear are now taking aim at hydrocarbon power by means of the myth of human-caused global warming.
The construction of just one nuclear power station like Palo Verde in each of the 50 states, with a full complement of 10 reactors, would supply all of the energy that the United States currently imports - with, in addition and at current prices, $300 billion per year worth of excess energy for export. The cost of construction for all 50 plants is about $1 trillion - the approximate U.S. trade and governmental annual deficit. The capital lost in each single year by our current energy deficit would build the technology to entirely erase that deficit.
Moreover, these plants could be constructed without the expenditure of any tax money. Simple legislative repeal of the taxes, regulations, and incentives to litigation with which our politicians have hindered nuclear power development is all that would be necessary. The domestic hydrocarbon industry could be similarly revived.
All government subsidies of energy industries should be repealed, which would save the tax payers money and end damaging political distortion of the free market. There are many ideas concerning innovations in energy production. While nuclear and hydrocarbon solutions are the only practical methods for solving America’s immediate energy problem, future developments may provide additional methods. The worst possible means by which to encourage these developments, however, is for politicians and bureaucrats in Washington – who are obviously clueless about energy technology - to choose technology and supervise development by means of tax subsidies.
It is not necessary to discern in advance the best course to follow. Repeal of these political impediments would permit the free market to determine the best mix of hydrocarbon, nuclear, and other energy-producing technologies.
What instead are our elected “representatives” doing? They are increasing the legal requirements to turn our food into fuel; they are banning Thomas Edison’s famous light bulb; they are heavily subsidizing spectacularly inefficient solar-electric systems for the rich - paid entirely by tax breaks useful only to those in high tax brackets; and they are increasingly embracing the mythical notion that ordinary Americans must use less energy to save the planet.
So, the greatest industrial, technological, and scientific power the world has ever known - created and made possible through institutionalized human freedom - is on the road to being turned into a second-rate nation with diminished human freedom. This is being accomplished by political destruction of America’s energy industries and of many of her other industries by similar means.
If we continue to allow our politicians to debase our currency at moneyfactory.com and to diminish our industrial capabilities through restrictions on energy production, we had best be prepared to endure the logical consequences - gasoline at more than $10 per gallon, $2,000 monthly electricity and gas bills, and, ultimately, energy rationing and technological poverty.
Why not place a mirror in front of your television set during the next political commercial? Then, look at the visage in the mirror and ask, “Do you really prefer to elect politicians who will continue to make the United States uninhabitable for the industries that fuel my car, power my air conditioner, light my lights, power my computer and wide-screen television, and allow my employer to remain in business?”
[Complete peer-reviewed scientific references to the facts in this article can be found in the peer-reviewed article, Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide by A. B. Robinson, N. E. Robinson, and W. Soon.
