The controversy over Russian attempts to coerce Ukraine and the slowness and timidity of European countries to respond to this reflect the dangerous dependence these countries have on Moscow for their oil and natural gas supplies. This dependence has been further demonstrated by the childlike faith many EU countries have placed in “green energy” as the way to combat climate change. The facts of the matter are that European countries such as Germany have seen their misplaced faith in “green energy” produce higher electricity prices, higher energy costs, and causing many international businesses to consider relocating to the U.S. due to our relatively lower energy costs.
U.S. attractiveness to these companies, which also applies to Canada, is due to the booming increase in U.S. natural gas and oil production thanks, in part, to the hydraulic fracturing or tracking revolution. The most recent data from the Energy Information Administration’s Short-Term Energy Outlook demonstrates continually increasing U.S. natural gas and oil production. These trends have lead many energy prognosticators to contend that it will be possible for the U.S. to export oil and natural gas in the near future. This would have an enormously beneficial impact on our geopolitical situation and an excellent market for these potential exports would be European countries to wean them off of their dangerous dependence on Russian oil and natural gas. If the Obama Administration were to miraculously get its act together and approve the Keystone Pipeline, which would allow for the transmission of oil from shale resources in the Canadian province of Alberta, it would be yet another blow to the decades long energy hegemony exerted over us by OPEC and dubiously friendly Middle East regimes.
The Energy Information Administration also informs us that our percentage of oil imports dropped to 40% in 2012 with domestic production accounting for 60% of our consumption with Western Hemisphere petroleum imports representing 53% of our net petroleum imports in 2012. It is unrealistic to claim that the U.S. itself can become energy independent but North American energy independence is a realistic possibility. Hopeful news is emerging in this regard from Mexico which is beginning to loosen the 7 ½ decade long monopoly its state-owned oil company Pemex has had on foreign ownership. We should also be grateful for Canada’s immense oil reserves in Alberta and elsewhere and the pro-energy and pro-economic growth policies of that country’s Conservative Government ably led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The fact that the U.S. was, as of 2012, the world’s second largest oil producer, just behind Saudi Arabia is further evidence that we have the ability to control our own energy destiny by prudently developing and environmentally protecting the oil and natural gas resources God has endowed us with in Alaska, North Dakota and Montana’s Bakken Basin, the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio, and other newly emerging and accessible domestic resources of these commodities.
We should strive to produce more energy efficient vehicles and accelerate our development of nuclear power. Yet the Obama Administration still remains fixated on expensive and unrealistically utopian green energy and its religious devotion to climate change. This week it was announced that Secretary of State John Kerry was sending a letter to all U.S. embassies instructing them to emphasize how important climate change is to U.S. foreign policy. Other countries are quite capable of determining their energy, environmental, and climatic policies and interests without self-righteous bleating from the Obama Administration. Public opinion polls within the U.S. are repeatedly demonstrating that climate change is an extremely low priority among Americans. We are more concerned with high energy prices, the lack of job creation, continuing increases in health care costs due to the dogmatic inflexibility and incompetence of Obamacare, and by an administration that is consciously willing to diminish the U.S. international power and presence at a time of increasing danger. Americans are also concerned that the Obama Administration is further injuring our economic situations by imposing unnecessary and costly environmental regulations of dubious constitutional validity which are likely to grievously injure the potential for U.S. economic and job growth at a time when public opinion is crying out for job creation.
It is particularly sad that at this time of revolutionary potential in U.S. energy policy, the Obama Administration and its acolytes are stuck in a paralyzing time warp that seeks to impose unnecessary constraints and expenses on American individuals and companies while administration policymakers and their environmentally allied sycophants seek to consumer prodigious amounts of carbon and energy jetting to exotic locales and berating us for being wasteful in our energy consumption practices. Hypocrisy has never been so prevalent in public life as when you hear pro-Obama trolls denounce the energy consumption patterns of average Americans.
Burkean Librarian 