Crazy Nancy, Cunning Barry

By Alan Caruba

When President Obama announced he would commit the nation to reduce “greenhouse gas emissions” in accordance with the failed UN Copenhagen Climate Change Conference goals, Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, issued yet another utterly crazed statement on January 29th.

“President Obama’s announcement marks a critical step forward in our effort to reduce the carbon footprint of the federal government—the largest consumer of energy in the U.S. economy.” For the record, the Capitol building’s electric power is provided by a coal-fired plant. And, for the record, the Speaker’s use of an executive jet to travel back and forth from her home in California every week has burned through $2.1 million while producing tons of greenhouse gases.

“With the President’s renewed call to complete work on a clean energy bill this year we look forward to putting people to work building up the industries of tomorrow, reducing our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, and preserving our natural resources for generations to come.”

Allowing large and small oil companies to explore and extract our national reserves of oil would reduce our dependency, but from the late 1970s onward, it has been government policy to prohibit this, despite the role it plays in our national security and, of course, the cost of a gallon of gas at the pump. There’s a reason much of our military power is deployed to protect Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States in the Middle East. We get 40% of our oil from there.

The so-called clean energy bill is “Cap-and-Trade”, a piece of legislation that would tax the use of energy by all Americans, thus raising their energy bills and reducing their ability to spend their money on consumer goods and services. The alleged “industries of tomorrow” include wind and solar energy companies, along with biofuel companies, all of which are totally dependent on government subsidies and mandates for their use. Remove the subsidies and they would go out of business.

In a February 2nd letter from the National Biodiesel Board to leaders in Congress says that the expiration of the biodiesel tax incentive that expired on December 31, 2009 “has essentially caused the production and use of biodiesel in the U.S. to cease…” No kidding!

Speaker Pelosi’s idea of “preserving our natural resources” is to restrict access to the billions of barrels of oil locked up in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve and to continue the ban on all off-shore exploration and extraction of countless billions of barrels of oil and cubic feet of natural gas estimated to exist in the 85% of the continental shelf that remain off limits.

While Congress continues on its wild borrowing and spending spree, Speaker Pelosi brags that the Congressional Record will be printed on “100 percent recycled paper” and that Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs will be replaced with “energy-efficient alternatives”; light bulbs that all contain mercury.

What justification can be made for denying consumers the right to purchase incandescent light bulbs? None!

President Obama has announced that, as soon as “Cap-and-Trade” is enacted, the U.S. will begin to “cut carbon emissions by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020.” To achieve this, we will all return to the practice of riding horses and using oxen to plow the fields for the planting of crops.

The fact that global warming is being discredited daily with new revelations about the bogus “science” used to justify it by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).seems to have escaped the notice of Speaker Pelosi, the President, and others in Congress.

What Americans are witnessing is a calculated agenda to undermine access to the energy the nation requires for present and future generations and thus undermines the economy of the nation that is totally dependent on the sufficient provision of electrical energy and the ability to utilize the nation’s vast oil, coal, and natural gas reserves, a policy that has been in place since the 1970s.

In his State of the Union speech, the President did call for more nuclear plants, but the government has stalled the building of all but two new nuclear plants since the 1970s and, thanks to Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, is unable to utilize the multi-billion dollar Yukka Mountain facility in Nevada for the storage of nuclear waste.

This and other proposals are a direct threat to the economy of the nation, diverting billions (of borrowed money) to phony “green jobs” and “clean energy.” It is bad news for America.

In September of last year, nearly a million Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. to protest healthcare reform and it is a wonder of civility that they and others have not returned to the nation’s capitol with pitchforks and torches to drive out the likes of Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress.