Energy Policy? What Energy Policy?

By Alan Caruba

When the government controls the provision of energy, it controls the lives of all citizens and the growth or failure of the nation’s economy. Everything else, including national defense, runs second when it comes to this single factor.

Recently the fourth annual survey of more than a hundred executives in the U.S. and Canadian electric and natural gas industries was released by Platts and Capgemini. Platts is a global provider of energy and metals information and Capgemini is a leading provider of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. The objective of the survey was to determine the opinion of energy industry executives regarding the first year and a half of the Obama administration’s energy policies.

The Obama administration’s energy policy is to have as little as possible.

The administration is bent on reducing access to national energy resources, coal, oil and natural gas, combined with a bizarre emphasis on “alternative” or “renewable” sources in the form of wind and solar energy. European nations that went this course ended up with fewer jobs, insufficient energy for the money invested, and massive fraud in its carbon credits exchanges.

It is essential to understand that the nation’s utilities have all signed onto the bogus “global warming” theory that carbon dioxide emissions threaten all life on Earth because they can make gobs of money raising the rates they currently charge for electricity. They expect to do so via the bogus selling and trade of “carbon credits”, a key element of the Cap-and-Tax bill currently in the Senate. It is a massive robbery of all energy consumers and that means everyone.

Under intense pressure from the government and from environmental organizations, many utilities have wasted millions on the installation of wind and solar farms, none of which provide enough electricity to even begin to meet their consumer’s needs. Moreover, they must all maintain traditional coal-burning, nuclear, and other forms of energy generation plants because neither wind or solar provide a reliable source of electricity.

This is the big, dirty secret of the so-called “sustainable” energy from wind and solar. It is not sustainable if the wind is not blowing and the sun is obscured by clouds. Wind energy provides about one percent of all the electricity used daily in America. In 2006 solar power provided 0.1 percent! By contrast, nuclear provides about 20 percent and coal provides just over 50 percent!

The alternative energy suppliers are sustained by a combination of taxpayer subsidies (your money) and mandates imposed on the utilities to include them with nuclear, coal and other energy sources. One way the government makes so-called sustainable energy appear to be a greater source is to include conventional hydroelectric energy.

According to the survey, “some 80% are dissatisfied with the U.S. government’s energy policy performance following the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration and amid a slowly rebounding economy,” adding, “there is considerable dissatisfaction in the lack of tangible and actionable policy and legislation.”

John Christens, vice president of Smart Energy Services for Capgemini, says, “Few utility executives consider the current solutions as satisfactory either in scale or feasibility.” That’s because there are NO current “solutions” to America’s growing needs for additional energy provision and the nation’s electrical grid is aging daily and in need of major upgrades.

Not surprisingly, since they stand to make billions if the Cap-and-Tax bill is passed, many utility executives were unhappy with the progress “on CO2 legislation and action, regulations which will increase the cost of power without addressing the root issue of atmospheric carbon…”

There is no “root issue” because carbon dioxide plays NO role whatever in climate change. The bloviations of Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are a huge package of lies based on flawed and deliberately spurious computer model projections.

In November 2009, the Climategate revelations that a handful of IPCC scientists had been misrepresenting the truth should have ended the global warming fraud, but it has only intensified the effort of those behind it to impose it on the world. At some point, having taken millions in government funding for research, particularly here in the U.S. and in England, some of these IPCC scientists should be on their way to jail if there is any justice to be had.

The survey is barely useful to the public because it was taken among the very utility executives who are guilty of supporting the global warming fraud in anticipation of reaping obscene profits. The cost of energy will soar if the Cap-and-Tax bill waiting a vote in the Senate is passed and signed into law by the president.

Meanwhile, the real energy policy of the Obama administration is to do everything in its immense power to thwart the building of any new coal-burning or nuclear plants while deceiving the public into believing that wind or solar has any real potential of meeting present and future needs. Dangling promises of “green jobs” is perhaps the cruelest lie of all. Virtually all of the technology required for wind or solar is manufactured overseas.

The Obama energy policy can be summed up as no new energy, no new jobs, and a very dark future for America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010