King Obama has Spoken

By Alan Caruba

It has taken less than two weeks in office for Barack Obama to confirm that his delusions of grandeur, evidence of which we saw throughout his campaign, are real. I am tempted to refer to him from now on as King Obama, not President Obama.

His executive orders, coming fast and furious, are revealing. Let me begin by pointing out as I seem to do on a daily basis of late that there is no global warming. The Earth is fully a decade into a cooling cycle. This may account for why it snowed a few days ago in the United Arab Emirates for the first time in recorded history.

Secondly, just because the greatest moron to ever hold the office of Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, thinks that “greenhouse gases emissions from vehicles” have anything to do with a non-existent global warming is not a justification for imposing so-called “efficiency standards” on automakers to reduce them.

King…er…President Obama, via executive order, has endorsed efforts in several states to restrict tailpipe emissions and require higher fuel efficiency standards. I have a suggestion. Eliminate blending ethanol with gasoline. Ethanol reduces the mileage of every gallon of gas. Get rid of it and you improve efficiency.

What could be more inefficient than to allow the states to introduce their own emissions standards? As it is the EPA has for years required dozens of different gasoline blending standards depending on what part of the nation it’s sold. That plus the ethanol requirement has been an unseen tax that everyone pays along with the state and federal taxes on gasoline.

All this is being sold to the public as a way to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. I have another suggestion. Why not allow U.S. oil companies to drill for oil in---oh, I don’t know—ANWR? Or maybe off the continental shelf of the nation?

Did you know that the U.S. Geological Service released a report in April 2008 in which it estimated that there are from 3 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in the North Dakota and Montana Bakken formation? The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska’s Prudoe Bay.

The U.S. does not lack for oil reserves. It lacks a President and a Congress that will permit it to be drilled, extracted, refined and sold without having to import a comparable amount from foreign producers.

According to Speaker Pelosi, though, “This morning, President Obama signaled that our country can no longer afford to wait to combat the climate crisis and our dangerous dependence on foreign oil.”

I repeat: there is no global warming. There is a climate crisis, however. The Earth is beginning to cool and, indeed, could be on the cusp of a new ice age. At the very least, we could be entering another one of the Earth’s previous mini-ice ages such as occurred from 1300 to 1850.

We can reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but neither the United States nor any other nation can ever be “energy independent.” Talk of energy independence is a deliberate lie that ignores the global marketplace for energy sources such as oil, coal, and natural gas.

Lastly, we are in a recession. The rest of the world is in a recession with us. Congress cannot “spend” us out of recession. That was tried during the Great Depression of the 1930s and it not only failed, it prolonged it well beyond the normal time such economic crises take to recover.

Obama is not a king. He is an elected President and, if these first two weeks are any indication, he and his Democrat controlled Congress are going to make every mistake made by FDR and his Congress.

By 2010, Americans will have an opportunity to return Congress to the control of a sobered Republican Party that can and should return to its principles of smaller government, fiscal prudence, and a strong defense policy.