5/21/11 Update:  Seems like billionaire T. Boone Pickens agrees with me.  I guess this means I shoulda been a billionaire, because you read it here first!

At the end of April in 2009, I wrote a blog piece titled "The Second Coming of the Energy Crisis" in which I offered an assessment that the energy 'crisis' that gripped the US in 2008 had not really gone away, just gone dormant, and high prices would return eventually.

The eventually is, of course, now.

Before I continue, let me try to be fair to whatever extent I can be fair towards this loathsome President:  Obama's truly pathetic, virtually incoherent energy "policy" is just the latest in a series of either non-existent or similarly incoherent energy policies advanced by a long line of his predecessors in that high office.  Indeed, my opinion is that ever since the famed energy crisis of 1973, when OPEC embargoed the United States for re-supplying Israel with arms during the Yom Kippur war, the United States has been unable to advance a meaningful long-term policy that either methodically or pragmatically gets us out of the business of importing huge quantities of crude oil from our enemies abroad.  So, with the back-drop of history, actually viewed, as opposed to re-written Marxist style as Obama is so fond of, Obama's lack of a coherent policy might not have been so awful if his predecessors had done something meaningful regarding the development of domestic energy supplies. 

However, the fact that all of Obama's modern predecessors screwed this up, does not excuse Obama from also screwing this up.  Indeed, because our energy policy has been such a mess, for so long, Obama's policy needed to be spot on, and obviously to all but his most ardent delusional followers....it isn't.

Core to the liberal view is the delusional thinking that if the cost of energy rises to the 'pain threshold' for the common folk, that miraculously someone will invent the inexhaustible energy solution out of the mother or all invention: necessity.  So, in order to put this theory to work, Obama and the leftists behind him have to turn the screws on an already weakened middle America, and also totally screw over the working poor.  Somehow, by artificially driving the cost of energy supplies up, someone out there is going to be spurred to invent the solution which has thus far eluded the world (notwithstanding 200 mpg carburetors supposedly stored in a secret vault somewhere in the bowels of GM).  After all, at least according to the extremists at the Sierra Club and elsewhere, it's for our own good in the long run - eh? 

The above theorem (for lack of a better term) has many flaws, but of the most significant is the flaw which liberals, being almost universally functionally illiterate on the stuffy boring science of economics, are incapable of seeing:  As the cost of foreign energy skyrockets, the near-term economy suffers multiple insults, and an already weakened United States bleeds out it's GDP overseas at a staggering rate to pay said enemies for their oil.

In short, the tactical driving up of energy costs in order to reduce or eliminate fossil fuel consumption, is a strategic disaster.

In late March 2010, Obama pledged to open certain domestic areas, including parts of the Atlantic Ocean to oil exploration.  In doing so, he drew fire from all sides.  The energy industry understood that Obama was blocking exploration in areas where we are reasonably sure there are large hydrocarbon reserves, while opening up exploration to areas where few were really interested in exploring. 

And then a scant few weeks later, the unthinkable happened:  The Chernobyl Of The Sea:  The Deep Water Horizon BP oil spill.

All drill-baby-drill bets were off.  Obama, obsessed with his image, and stinging from near universal criticism of his handling of the spill crisis, was determined to prevent such a debacle from every happening again on his watch - and he did it by turning off the new exploration spigot.  Yup, for all intents and purposes, a complete shut down of Gulf oil exploration, and a reversal and outright ban on exploration where he previously called for exploration.  In short, in a scant few weeks, Obama did a 180 on exploration, and then set about impeding or outright banning any new exploration within the domestic sphere of the United States.    People lost their jobs, hugely expensive oil exploration rigs went elsewhere in the world far more friendly to oil exploration, and the stage was set for the next energy crisis.

Now the next energy crisis is upon us.  Brought about by a combination of events, but mostly form political unrest in the oil producing states overseas, in concert with the Obama Administration's purposeful devaluation of the US dollar in order to artificially prop up a chronically anemic domestic economy.

All too predictably, the price of crude oil zooms, people start complaining, polls numbers start dropping, and suddenly, miraculously, Obama's drill-baby-drill half-baked policies are back on.  This, of course, after Obama just recently mocked Americans for driving gas guzzlers and complaining about the price of gas, and claiming there was next to nothing he could do about the high cost of oil.  Well, there may not have been anything Obama could do, except he did something, which was to claim to reverse his drill ban and exploration ban policies all while cautioning us it would take time for these new, old, new again initiatives to produce any results. 

So which is it Mr. President?  There's nothing you can do about the high cost of energy?  Or there is something you can do but, gosh, it's going to take time to do it?

As flip-flops go, this one is a colossus.

Now, I know that Obama was totally insincere about domestic oil exploration to begin with.  So, I know that Obama's reversal of his exploration initiative in the face of the BP oil spill was no big deal since it was all blowing smoke.  And now, we are back to insincere claims that Obama is going to expedite drilling permits and so forth. Yet again I know it's a pile of bullshit intended for the masses that can't remember one headline from the next, let alone what Obama promised a year ago that he didn't deliver on, that he is now promising again, and won't deliver now either.

In the meantime, staggering amounts of our wealth are flowing out of this country at a rate beyond alarming, and it's flowing mostly to our avowed enemies. 

In a word, it's stupid.  Really stupid.












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