Thursday, May 17, 2007

Prioritizing Problems


Immigration? The politicians will come up with something far from perfect, inefficiently complex and probably counter productive to the goal of security under the rule of law. Hopefully the resilience of our free society will adapt without destroying those freedoms underlying the planetary supremacy of our economy. The pathway leading directly to massive hardship for the entire population will more likely emerge from our ruling class management of energy policy.

The Coming Explosion in Energy Prices: The problem with US energy is self inflicted and political in nature but the blame can be spread to both sides of the aisle. It has been a 30+ year slide into less and less independence from the vagaries of the global oil industry. During this time the only place energy companies have been allowed to explore is next to a dry hole (which conveniently allows environmentalist to claim there is nothing there to drill for, so why allow additional exploration), and the only place they have been allowed to build a refinery is NOWHERE. Very little energy investment or development has been allowed in the United States, whether it is ANWAR (in Alaska), off shore drilling, Nuclear Energy, New Refineries, Clean coal technologies, these things have become verboten.

As Energy development has become captives of the courts, trial lawyers and environmentalists, and politicians once again have betrayed their oath of fiduciary and sound oversight of the US energy policies. Politicians talk about energy independence, but really pay only lip service to the idea of reduced dependence on foreign oil. In fact, their actions say just the opposite, putting the lie to their words. Their talk is all illusion, turn it over in your mind and see through it. Vast US domestic areas of prime oil and natural gas territories remain off limits to environmentally safe energy development. To judge present day oil and natural gas production techniques to those of yesteryears is baloney. When Katrina struck did you hear of huge environmental catastrophes? OIL spills? NO. The only catastrophes were caused by the government’s corps of engineers.

I don’t want energy independence. The whole idea of pursuing a circumscribed bubble sealed off from the rest of the world strikes me as absurd. What I want is a world where commerce is free from extortion, corruption and self serving manipulations by the powerful. An economy where risk and reward allows private individuals to seek answers to problems. This idealism should not be taken as an “ends justify the means” strategic plan, but rather an orientation guiding the direction of the next steps.