The State of the Union Address (SOTUA) is now last week’s history.
Nearly every aspect of it has been fully dissected. For example, the
National Taxpayers Union (NTU)
has done a line-by-line analysis of what they call the “most expensive
and widest ranging State of the Union Address yet.” They found that the
“quantifiable agenda items” in the President’s proposals “weighed in at
$83.4 billion.” The NTU called the efforts to combat
climate change
the “most costly single agenda item”—citing a “version of the
‘cap-and-trade’ bill to which Obama referred in his speech was priced at
$282.4 billion total, or $56.5 billion per year.” The SOTUA
specifically calls for “a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate
change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a
few years ago.
I’ve listened to and watched the coverage. I’ve not heard anyone
address this one line from the speech—maybe it’s been covered and I just
missed it. If so, maybe you missed it, too.
“I'm also issuing a new goal for America: Let's cut in half the energy
wasted by our homes and businesses over the next 20 years.”
On the surface, it sounds innocent enough. No one wants
“waste”—especially not wasted energy. To fully understand the impact of
the simple statement, you have to read the
supporting document released
coincidentally with the SOTUA: The President’s Plan for A Strong Middle
Class & A Strong America.
Within the plan, we find the following:
“doubling American energy productivity by 2030, starting with a new
Energy Efficiency Race to the Top for states: The President is laying
out a bold but achievable goal to slash energy waste through increased
efficiency.”
This whole energy efficiency idea came from the
Energy 2030
report recently released by the Alliance Commission on National Energy
Efficiency Policy. The idea is that “energy productivity, or the amount
of economic output possible at a given level of energy supply, increases
as does efficiency, thereby allowing us to do more with less energy.”
Kateri Callahan, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, which
spearheaded Energy 2030,
said
the following in response to Obama’s inclusion of their ideas: “We very
much welcome that the administration embraced some of the
recommendations.”
Addressing the line in question, energy writer Elisa Wood
said:
“It will take some serious work to achieve the goal. We must upgrade
energy infrastructure, adopt advanced technologies, educate and motivate
consumers, and institute a favorable regulatory climate, the commission
said. These steps will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but the
potential exists to capture a trillion dollars in energy savings.”
Again, efficiency, on its own, is a laudable goal. The inclusion of
this comment in the SOTUA—which most agree the “laundry list” of dreams
will never happen—does represent Obama’s ideology of pushing less energy
usage. This is troubling because it is widely accepted that
energy consumption and economic growth
go hand-in-hand. A successful country uses more energy. For example,
one of the reasons the US is using less gasoline is that so many people
are unemployed. They are not driving to and from work every day. They
are not taking long driving vacations. They are hunkered down. Heavy
manufacturing requires abundant, available, and affordable energy.
Energy is one of manufacturing’s biggest expenses.
But because of closed
factories, we are actually using less electricity in the industrial
sector than we did in 2000.
If the President truly wants to bring manufacturing back to America, as
he claims, instead of pushing for less energy use, he should be working
to make available as much low-cost energy as possible. But he is
pushing for more “clean energy”—which is also many times more expensive,
as Americans are beginning to see on their utility bills.
The problem with the whole “efficiency” argument can be found, in part,
in Wood’s comment: it will “cost hundreds of billions of dollars.”
News flash! We are in the worst economic crisis of most of our
lifetimes. We have a spending problem.
We do not have an energy
problem—especially not an electricity problem (and the Energy 2030
report focuses primarily on electricity). Within our borders, we have
enough coal, natural gas, and uranium (to fuel nuclear power plants) to
power a strong, growing American economy for 300 years. Instead of
promoting our abundant fuels, our president is ideologically bound to
promoting energy that is inefficient, ineffective and uneconomical—while
threatening our best competitive advantage in the global marketplace:
low-cost energy.
If what I am positing here is incorrect, the Keystone pipeline would be
approved (I do not think it will be—but I hope I am wrong); the EPA
would be directed to dial back on the threat of a fracking ban—allowing
the states to manage their own regulations, as they currently do;
liquefied natural gas export terminals would be approved; modern
super criticalcoal-fueled
power plants would be built and older plants, that are burning so much
cleaner today than they were 40 years ago, would be allowed to live out
their productive lives instead of being shut down prematurely; federal
lands would be opened up for access to our oil and natural gas resources
that can be extracted with precision; the endangered species act
wouldn’t be used to block energy development, including copper mining;
and so-called “investments” in expensive green energy—that line the
pockets of the President’s friends—would be curtailed (after all, we do
already know how to make electricity from the wind and the sun, if we
ever really need it, and we can take the technology off the shelf and
implement it); and the economy would be booming—à la North Dakota.
Sadly, America is heading the other direction—pushing for reduced
energy usage. What would the United States look like in a reduced energy
environment? At best, check out Europe. At worst, just ask the
passengers of the cruise ship Triumph who had to sleep outdoors in a
makeshift tent city because there wasn’t electricity for air
conditioning, who ate raw food because there was no way to cook it, and
who had to use plastic bags as toilets because there was no way to
process the waste. A life without energy is no triumph—it is a tragedy.
