Why Being "Green" Has Put America in the Red

By Alan Caruba

What I cannot understand is why so many people cannot figure out where the blame ultimately belongs when it comes to the high price of oil these days.

Who has been talking about how horrid Americans are with regard to the consumption of energy?

Who has been advocating for years that Americans use mass transportation more?

Who has urged that polar bears be declared “threatened” in order to close off any exploration, discovery, and extraction of oil and natural gas from Alaska’s north and northwestern coasts?

Who has lobbied against opening up even 1% of the immense Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge where a massive amount of oil is known to exist?

Why have Florida’s Governors consistently resisted permission for American oil companies to drill offshore to secure oil when the Chinese are already engaged in similar efforts off of Cuba, a mere 90 miles away?

Who is forever denouncing “fossil fuels” or “dirty” energy?

Who has protested the building of nuclear and coal-fired plants to generate electricity for a growing American population?

Who is responsible for a vast matrix of “environmental” regulations that has made the building of new oil refineries prohibitively expensive?

And who has gone along with all this for decades?

The first answer is the nation’s environmental organizations.

The second answer is Congress.

Dragging a bunch of oil company executives in front of Congress and demanding to know why they won’t sell oil they have to buy in the global marketplace for a high price—the price is set by mercantile exchanges, not oil companies—and then will not sell it at a low price defies common sense.

These oil executives are representatives of investor-owned oil companies, not the nationalized companies that own 77% of the Earth’s known oil reserves. If they don’t make a profit, their investors will feel it and the vast bulk of those investors are Americans with mutual funds or Americans whose pensions depend on those profits.

But no one seems the slightest bit upset with the Sierra Club that wants Congress to pass a “Global Warming Wildlife Survival Act” even though there is no global warming. The Sierra Club is still saying that “climate change is decimating many species” as if there has never been any prior climate change in the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s existence or that 95% of all the species that ever lived on the Earth are now extinct.

Every time you hear the word “Green” you need to keep in mind what you’re paying at the gas pump and why that word signals the increased cost of everything to which it is applied.

All those “Green” corporations can afford to be “Green” because they are passing the cost of their products and services along to you.

All those “alternative” energy sources like wind and solar power are in business because of government subsidies and increased charges from your energy company. Without that funding, the 1% of unreliable electricity they provide would not be worth spit.

So prepare to pay more for everything because everything in America gets delivered by trucks.

Be prepared to pay more for food because fertilizers are made in part from natural gas, a by-product of oil extraction. Be prepared to pay more as corn and soy is diverted into ethanol production, a fuel that provides less mileage than gasoline and requires as much power to produce while all the time polluting the air.

The unholy speculation that is driving up the current price of a barrel of oil is most certainly contributing to the current crisis, but this “bubble” will eventually burst.

The environmental juggernaut, however, has no intention of going away and it, more than any other, is the reason our economy, the value of the dollar, and our ability to access our own oil is in deep, deep trouble.

One can only hope that Americans will eventually not want to be “Green” any more as the truth of the harm environmental organizations have done sinks in. That thought may occur when a trip to visit grandma and grandpa becomes too expensive.