Energy Dominance Isn’t Just a Trump Obsession

Guest Post by Tom Luongo

Energy Dominance should be the catchphrase of the day. It’s on the minds of every political figure, and the focus of every economy.

This is especially true of those vulnerable to a change in the status quo, namely Saudi Arabia.

While some continue to believe the gyrations of the oil market over the past few months are evidence of our running up against the limit of the petroleum based global economy, I disagree.

The world is awash in decades of easily-extracted oil and gas. The supply of it has been kept off the market due to its centrality in the grand game of geopolitics. But, it has nothing to do with the amount of oil and gas out there.

Continue reading “Energy Dominance Isn’t Just a Trump Obsession”

U.S. ENERGY INDEPENDENCE

Listening to the two clowns running for President discussing energy policy is like listening to those babies on the internet babbling jibberish as if it means something. One clown babbles about renewable energy and green jobs. The other clown babbles about drill, drill, drill and 100 years of supply under our feet. These two lying sacks of shit are telling the American public that America can and will be energy independent any day now. You see stories in the MSM that we have become a net exporter of “petroleum products”. The clueless masses thinks this means we have an excess supply of oil. What it means is that our economy is so bad, we have gasoline left over to sell other countries because we don’t have enough business to generate demand in this country.

The fact is that the United States uses 18 million barrels of oil per day. We import 10 million barrels of oil per day. We export 2 million barrels of petroleum products per day. We extract 5.7 million barrels per day from our soil. Do these facts support the idea of energy independence in the near future? Ever?

Is fracking going to save the day? When was the last time you filled up your tank with shale natural gas? How will our glut of shale gas save us? I haven’t seen the plans for converting gas stations and vehicles to natural gas. Have you? Obama wants you to plug your cars into an outlet and use coal to power your cars. The 2,000 Chevy Volts that Government Motors has sold this year will surely save the country from Big oil.

The dishonesty and lies spewed by both parties regarding U.S. energy independence benefits no one. An honest discussion about the implications to our society of much more expensive energy is too much to ask in the land of delusion.

DON’T WORRY, DRIVE ON: Fossil Fools & Fracking Lies from MONSTRO on Vimeo.

 From both political parties come cliches on energy policy

Monday, September 24,2012

 

We’ve heard it all before. Over and over for most of the last 40 years.

From politicians of both parties, cliches and nonsense on energy. Take the biggest cliche of all: U.S. energy independence. The candidates are all for it. Mitt Romney says he’ll make us independent by 2020, conveniently at the end of his second term. President Barack Obama says the route to energy independence is an “all-of-the-above” strategy and a “doubling-down” on renewables, especially if, as Obama has argued at various times, we have “Apollo” programs for new energy technologies.

These pronouncements are imprecise to the point of being meaningless.

Virtually any policy could be attached to the slogans, and their interminable restatement seems mainly an effort to produce a few uplifting sound bites on the evening news.

So Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, R-Wis., are for U.S. energy independence.

How original! This has been proposed by, well, just about every politician since Richard Nixon. He came up with the idea in 1973 (to be achieved by 1980). Romney’s only innovation is an eight-year time frame and he has called for “North American energy independence,” to include Canada and Mexico, both major energy exporters. Nixon wanted independence in seven years, but since Gerald Ford, the standard energy independence time frame has been 10 years. When Ford’s aides first looked into the matter, they felt their first goal was to redefine “independence” and their second was to redefine “10 years.”

The pained effort to define energy independence has been ongoing. In the 1970s Nixon’s (and Gerald Ford’s) Treasury Secretary William Simon thought energy independence meant having diversified sources of oil supply. By that definition we’ve been energy independent for about 25 years.

I have no idea what Romney means by it, especially since he seems to want us to only be independent of such countries as Venezuela (at least under Hugo Chavez) and of the Middle East.

Of course, the simplest definition is one Nixon first used: We would only use energy supplies produced in and by the U.S. This is possible; we could forbid imported energy supplies. Period.

It would also be almost unspeakably stupid. It would mean, for example, if world energy prices were low, we would forcibly lower our standard of living and put American firms at a great competitive disadvantage by choosing expensive energy over cheaper. No doubt other nations would send us a “thank you.” Complete energy self-sufficiency was tried in Romania under the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

Ask any Romanian who lived through that time how well the experiment worked out; you won’t get a recommendation.

A few politicians and pundits argue that our engagement in the global energy market does cost us. That is why we went to war, in 1991, most notably. But does anyone seriously believe the U.S. (the world’s only military superpower) would just stand aside while the global economy fell to pieces because of a major disruption of the oil market?

Of course, Obama also touts energy independence on his campaign website along with a few new imprecise energy slogans.

“All-of-the-above,” for example, could mean “anything-I-like-to the extent-I-like it.” “Doubling-down” could mean spending twice as much money as we already have or just reinforcing some nebulous commitment with twice as much rhetoric, uttered twice as loudly.

Obama also has the burden of having spent billions of taxpayer dollars already on his fantasies of renewable energy “Apollo” programs, programs that were supposed to create millions of “green jobs.” Like energy independence, as studies have shown, it’s unclear just what constitutes a green job.

What is really unfortunate about the president’s policies is that he could actually do some good on the energy front by ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to suspend the pernicious Renewable Fuel Standard — a.k.a. the ethanol mandate. He could even blame George W. Bush since the 2007 ethanol bill was one Bush strongly endorsed.

Then again so did Sen. Barack Obama and many other Democrats in Congress.

Of course, that bill had a lofty goal beyond ethanol: As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described it, this was the U.S. “energy independence day” bill.

And who opposes that?
Peter Z. Grossman is a professor of economics at Butler University in Indianapolis and the author of “U.S. Energy Policy and the Pursuit of Failure.”