Welcome to the Third World

As Britain suffered through its coldest December in a century, families were forced to choose between keeping homes warm and feeding their children nourishing meals – thanks to climate policies that have forced extensive reliance on wind power and deliberately driven energy prices skyward.

Barely two months later, the UK’s power grid CEO informed the country that its days of reliable electricity are numbered. Families, schools, offices, shops, hospitals and factories will just have to “get used to” consuming electricity “when it’s available,” not necessarily when they want it or need it. A new “smart grid” will be used to allocate decreasing electricity supplies, on a rolling basis or according to bureaucratic determinations as to which consumers most need available power – mostly from wind turbines that provided a pitiful 0.04% of Britain’s electricity during its coldest days last December.

Meanwhile, the EU’s Energy Commissioner warned that German electricity prices are already at “the upper edge” of what society can accept and businesses can tolerate. Taxes, levies and regulations imposed in the name of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and global warming are forcing companies to relocate to other countries and causing “a gradual process of de-industrialization” across Germany.

Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt called for a full and independent investigation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, its practices and suspect science. The IPCC no longer has integrity or credibility, he said, and some of its researchers “have shown themselves to be fraudsters.”

To all of which, the autocratic European Commission essentially said “Drop dead.” The EU, it decreed, will spend $375 billion (€270 billion) annually to slash CO2 emissions by at least 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, and 80% by 2050.

Welcome to the Third World, Europeans, where costly electricity is available only from time to time, at unexpected hours, depending on bureaucratic whims and how much power wind turbines and other “environment-friendly” generators can muster.

Is the USA next in line? The United States is reaping imaginary bounties from its $814-billion “stimulus” spending orgy. It hemorrhaged $223 billion in red ink during February alone – on its way to a projected 2011 deficit of $1.5 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office reports.

Over 13.7 million Americans remain unemployed; another 8.3 million are involuntarily employed only part-time; black unemployment stands at 15.3 percent; and gasoline prices have hit $4 per gallon, foretelling more rough waters ahead for the still fragile US economy.

America depends on abundant, reliable, affordable energy – 85% of it hydrocarbons. Coal generates half of all US electricity, and up to 90% in its manufacturing heartland – versus 1% from wind and solar. Newfound natural gas supplies promise a sea change in US energy supplies and electricity generation. However, oil still powers transportation, shipping and petrochemicals – and in 2010 the United States exported $337 billion to import 61% of this precious liquid fuel.

Thankfully, the Obama Administration, environmentalists and (mostly Democratic) politicians take this situation very seriously, and are doing something about it … according to their parallel universe.

Democrats are willing to trim up to $5 billion from the $3.8 trillion 2011 federal budget (0.15%), while Republicans insist that $57 billion (1.5%) should be “slashed.” As to reducing the deficit by increasing revenues, most of that discussion still centers on raising taxes on whatever “rich” people are still out there. On the energy front, things are truly disconnected from reality.

Unlocking America’s still abundant hydrocarbon resources and unleashing our innovative, hard-driving free enterprise system would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in leasing, royalty and tax revenues for federal, state and local governments. It would put millions back to work … help stanch the flow of red ink … keep tens of billions of crude oil spending and investment in America … and create enormous new wealth, instead of redistributing a dwindling pool of old wealth.

We must drill safely, use fuel more efficiently in vehicles and power plants, and get more from every underground reservoir. And we could do so, if government would allow it.

Just consider the incredible revolution that the genius of American capitalists has presented the world: hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” to tap previously inaccessible oil and gas deposits. This technology has turned “depletion” and “sustainability” claims upside down. It has already doubled US natural gas reserves and given North America over a century of recoverable gas, at current consumption rates.

It is also unlocking oil wealth in the vast Bakken shale formation of Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. Oil production there has already soared from 3,000 barrels a day five years ago to over 225,000 today. The US Energy Information Administration says it could reach 350,000 barrels a day by 2035; industry sources say it could top a million barrels by 2020. Related oilfield employment has soared from 5,000 to over 18,000 in the same five-year period, and could eventually reach 100,000 jobs. At $100 a barrel, even 350,000 barrels a day could mean $1.6 billion in annual royalties, from Bakken oil alone.

The new Made in America technology is already changing energy, economic and political landscapes in Europe, and will soon do so across the globe. It is a technologically possible and economically affordable solution that generates bountiful jobs and revenues – as opposed to pixie dust solutions that require perpetual subsidies and address speculative problems. Offshore and ANWR drilling could do likewise.

Unfortunately, the White House, Environmental Protection Agency, Interior Department, and too many in Congress, courts and state legislatures are determined to restrict and obstruct this hydrocarbon revolution. They want to select business winners and losers, force America to convert to expensive, subsidized, unreliable, land-intensive wind, solar and ethanol power – and tell people how much energy they can have, and when.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is using groundless claims about possible groundwater contamination to delay fracking operations. Because Congress rejected cap-tax-and-trade, she has rewritten the Clean Air Act to label plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide a “pollutant” and restrict CO2 emissions from power plants, refineries and other facilities. That will further increase energy costs for families and businesses, forcing more companies to lay more people off or close their doors – even as China and India build new coal-fired power plants every week, sending global CO2 levels higher and higher.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has shut down leasing and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, put tens of thousands out of work, ignored court orders to end his moratorium, and issued decrees that make millions of additional onshore and offshore acres off limits to drilling. He has blocked exploration in ANWR because its oil riches won't make us energy independent (as though even massive wind, solar, ethanol and electric car programs would do so).

President Obama wants oil, gas, coal and electricity prices to “skyrocket,” to make “green” energy appear more attractive. Energy Secretary Steven Chu wants to “boost the price of gasoline to levels in Europe” – over $8 per gallon! Most of all, these anti-hydrocarbon politicians want a self-sustaining political-environmentalist-industrial-public sector union complex based on government subsidies to favored industries and companies, in exchange for campaign contributions that will keep them in power.

This palpable, intolerable insanity must end. It’s time to tell Congress we need real energy for real jobs, real revenues and a revitalized America. And we need it now.

British are stupid sheep.

They let their government take away their right to self-defense, they let their government take away their right to free speech, and now they are letting their government turn off their lights.

I have no sympathy for British sheep.

And I have no sympathy for American sheep if we let it happen here.

This is all part of a deliberate plan to destroy the economies of the advanced Western democracies and turn them into leftist, backward, third world dictatorships.

There is no energy shortage. All so called energy problems are created by the government. Government now makes energy far more expensive than it should be and is systematically destroying the reliable energy systems already in place in the U.S. The Democrats look forward to the day when you have to go to some corrupt politician and literally beg to not have your home or business shut off. They want you to have to beg to not have your pipes freeze or your children huddled helplessly in the cold and the dark.

Does anybody remember this quote?

“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.” Barack Obama

The Obama administration has done all they can to disrupt and delay current construction of new power plants. The have done all they can to prevent drilling for oil and natural gas. They are wasting hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing inefficient and unreliable “green” energy projects. These subsidies merely give money to the politically connected and the dishonest.

Wake up America. Our great country is systematically being bankrupted and destroyed.

Americans will not accept going back to huts and dug-outs because a bunch of Leftist tree-huggers refuse to let us have our natural gifts from God, our oil, coal and gas, to sustain our families and our country.

Oh, not all Americans will be living in huts, pedaling bicycles to work and shivering in barely-heated homes. The swells hyping this nonsense will still be jetting to Aspen in their Gulfstream jets, heating and cooling their 25,000 square foot homes, and puttering around Tennessee lakes on 60-foot floating palaces that consume enough fuel in a single run for us to run our SUV for a year. (Think Gore.)

If we have another winter in the US and northern Europe anything like the current still-dragging-on winter, and have $5 gasoline & home heating oil, and soaring food prices, I fear that we'll see thousands of poor and elderly freezing to death or starving in their unheated homes while desperate politicians futily scramble, too late, to find a way out of the mess they've created. Sadly, I'm convinced that only a tragedy of truly massive proportions like this will arouse the populace to wrest power from the loons and restore sanity to energy policy.

“They let their government take away their right to self-defense, they let their government take away their right to free speech, and now they are letting their government turn off their lights.”

Unfortunately they did not “let” this happen, they demanded it! And now they are reaping the bitter fruit of those demands. It’s the small minority of people that haven’t agreed to this that I feel sorry for but what can they do when the rest of their countrymen have gone absolutely insane?

[As Britain suffered through its coldest December in a century, families were forced to choose between keeping homes warm and feeding their children nourishing meals – thanks to climate policies that have forced extensive reliance on wind power and deliberately driven energy prices skyward...]

Ah, the benefits of socialism (unbrideled passions and greed and ambition)which results in higher prices, higher taxes, less freedom, less food,less energy, less housing, less jobs, less money, more alcohol and drug and gambling addictions, more oppression, more hatred and variance and violence and greed and ambition and selfishness. Socialism is caused by godless secular humanists who believe lies and deny God's existences and therefore results in their hoarding of all the benefits of society to themselves and has existed since the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden with the introduction of the sin of greed.
The left reminds me very much of the type of people God has judged for violence throughout the centuries and very much like the men of Noah's day who hated God until God was forced to bring judgment to their evil deeds because of the bloodshed of the wicked. Genesis 6: 1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, 2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. 3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. 4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. 5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. 7 And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. 8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.

Key word in all of it: DELIBERATELY

For centuries human social groups - tribes, cities, nation-states - banded together to increase their chances of survival through commerce and specialization e.g. one man grew wheat while the other made pottery so that neither had to go without or producing everything himself. Survival gave way to growth and eventually outright luxury.

But independence and freedom aren’t a good mix with statism. Politicians who have a twin thirst for adulation and power want a steady stream of people with hands out begging for a crust.

And so once-great nations are willingly impoverishing their own citizens by propagating the AGW myth. As with all statists, it’s not enough for them to take away freedom by force or implied force in the form of fines, taxes, etc. No, they must include an overload of stomach-churning sanctimony and kindergarten-level iconography featuring earth, sun, trees, birds, etc. The gullible, the sympathetic and those who STILL believe that collectivism will produce egalitarianism ate it up.

‘They let their government take away their right to self-defense, they let their government take away their right to free speech, and now they are letting their government turn off their lights.”

I am fascinated by your comment. Could you expand it. I understood that the lack of a written constitution and ‘progressive’ jurisprudence’ stripped Britons of most of their right to self defense (which was never as strong by any means as the common law understanding of self defense in the US}. Further gun ownership was severely impacted by laws the Tory governments in the 20’s enacted after the General Strike because of fears of a workers uprising. The recent confiscation laws only stood on the shoulders of earlier bad laws.

I would really be interested in a longer explanation of your most interesting post.

A new “smart grid” will be used to allocate decreasing electricity supplies, on a rolling basis or according to bureaucratic determinations as to which consumers most need available power – mostly from wind turbines that provided a pitiful 0.04% of Britain’s electricity during its coldest days last December.

They're getting the Super Grid ready to impose on us. Remember, 'bummer told us - "You can't HAVE your thermostat on 72, you can't EAT all the food you want oo ..." -

One size fits all...re how much heat they'll allow us. (Of course, there'll be plenty of 'waivers' for friends of the gov't and 'their people."

Now, while he says WE can't have out heat set at 72, HE, in the oval office, runs it at 77. 'but but, he grew up in Hawaii and his blood was thinner."

Hello? He lived in the Windy City, one of the coldest cities in winter, for some 30+ years. I'd think that's acclimation time enough.

That said, I haven't been able to AFFORD setting my heat on 72 for many years/ Indeed, now, 72 would drive me out of the house. The reason I have it lower - by far? MONEY.

We need to watch this. I imagine he'll be trying to slip this under the door anyone now

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