AMERICAN PRIORITIES REDUX

• First, permit me a few additional comments about our lack of a meaningful energy policy.  Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal recently commented on the stark contrast between the US and Brazil.  In November, Brazil discovered that billions of barrels of oil lie beneath the Santos Basin, 180 miles offshore from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.  The US has known for decades that at least 8.5 billion proven barrels of oil sit off its Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts, with the Interior Department estimating 86 billion barrels of undiscovered oil.  The contrast is that Brazil is ready and eager to exploit this find for the benefit of its nation.  Henninger writes:  “At this point in time, is there another country on the face of the earth that would possess the oil and gas reserves held by the United States and refuse to exploit them? . . . We won’t drill.”

1. California will not drill for the estimated 1.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil off its coast because of the bad memories of the 1969 spill near Santa Barbara.
2. The US will not drill for the estimated 5.6 to 16 billion barrels of oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) because of caribou!
3. In 1990, George H.W. Bush signed an order putting virtually all of the US outer continental shelf’s oil and gas reserves off limits.  Bill Clinton continued that “lock up” until 2013.
4.  Off our shores in the US there are at least 60 trillion untapped cubic feet of natural gas that we cannot access because of these orders!

Here is America’s energy policy:  “While Brazilians proudly embrace Petrobras [the Brazilian oil company], yelling ‘We’re Going to be No. 1,’ the US Democratic nominee for president, Barack Obama, promises to impose an ‘excess profits tax’ on American oil producers.”  Henninger writes:  “We live in a world in which Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez use their vast oil and gas reserves as instruments of state power.  Here, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid use their control of Congress to spend a week debating a ‘climate-change bill’. . . While other nations use their oil reserves to attain world status, we give ours up.  Why shouldn’t they conclude that, long term, these people can be taken?”  There is no other nation on earth sitting on such vast oil and natural gas reserves but will not drill for them!!!  Instead, we are saying to the world, please drill for yours at any cost and permit us to buy it from you, because we simply will not drill for ours.  Both presidential candidates are offering no solution to America’s energy needs, for both will continue to refuse to drill for the vast reserves we already have.  As I stated last week, the US has no energy policy.  Henninger concludes:  “This is the year Americans joined the real world of energy costs [with $4 gas].  Now someone needs to explain to them [American citizens] why we—and we alone—are sitting on an ocean of energy and won’t drill for it.”  See Henninger’s essay in the Wall Street Journal (12 June 2008).

• Second, in terms of our national priorities, consider the polar bear situation.  Today, because of restrictions on hunting, polar bears may be more numerous than ever and are certainly twice as numerous as they were three decades ago.  But, the Interior Department of the United States government, bound by the Endangered Species Act, has declared that polar bears are a “threatened” species, the first species whose supposed jeopardy has been ascribed to global warming.  The Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, argues that they are “threatened in the foreseeable future,” by which he means 45 years!  He cites the claim that sea ice is melting and computer models postulate future melting caused by human activity.  George Will writes, tongue in cheek, “Now that the polar bears are wards of the government, and now that it is a legal doctrine that humans are responsible for global warming, the Endangered Species Act has acquired unlimited application. . . No one can anticipate or control the implications that judges might discover in the polar bear designation.  Give litigious environmentalists a compliant judge, and the Endangered Species Act might become what New Dealers wanted the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 to be—authority to regulate almost everything.”  Will cites the conservative theorist, Friedrich Hayek, who talked of the “fatal conceit” of government—“that it can know the future’s possibilities and can and should control the future’s unfolding.”  That is what is occurring today in America:  We want a government that knows the future and can control the future—how absurd!  If that is the kind of government we truly want, we have bought a lie and are now willing to surrender our freedom.  We are embracing the state’s supervision of all dimensions of our lives, narrowing individual choice in the name of collective good, defined by the state.  The declaration about the polar bear as an endangered species is a hallmark of a growing “license to intrude” on behalf of the state.  Or as Will so humorously writes: “Onward, green soldiers, into preventive war on behalf of some bears who are simultaneously flourishing and ‘threatened.’”  See Will’s essay in the Washington Post (22 May 2008).

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