Stone Age or Smartphones?

President Obama has made a lot of questionable statements and decisions in his time in office.  He was going to close Guantanamo and move the foreign terrorists to federal prison in the United States.  He was going to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal court in New York City.  He was going to pass a costly cap and trade program that the CBO estimated would cost the average household an extra $1,600/year (in 2006 dollars).  He did ram through a health care reform bill that he claimed on the campaign trail would "bring down premiums by $2,500 for the typical family".  He has apologized to almost every country in the world based on what apparently is his view that the U.S. is a flawed nation.

However, it is hard to see that any decision or statement he has made was so misguided or illogical as his refusal to approve the Keystone XL pipeline project.  He has argued that it is because there has not been enough time to review "environmental" impacts.  However, over the last three years Keystone has  had 2 EPA reviews done, a State Department environmental review and a positive recommendation by President Obama's own energy advisors.  The project was a "go" from all concerned except the President and his environmental extremist friends.

Warren Meyer of Forbes debunks the environmental concerns and notes that the Keystone pipeline would have carried more energy to the United States than the total of all of the green energy projects funded by the Obama administration.  It also would have accomplished this with no taxpayer funds.

Local environmental concerns were merely the public pretext for a decision that is much more troubling. Opposition to the pipeline began to rally among radical environmental groups long before any of them had the first clue about the pipeline route. The real goal of these groups was not to protect water along the pipeline route, but to make it impossible to develop new sources of oil in Canada. Unable to stop Canadian oil drilling and tar sand extraction programs, environmental groups are now trying to block any pipeline that is proposed out of the oil producing regions.

Some would argue that these opponents aren’t anti-energy, they just want to shift energy use from fossil fuels to “green” energy like wind and solar. This is either disingenuous or unbelievably naive. The Keystone XL pipeline would have single-handedly carried more energy to the United States than the sum of all the green energy projects funded by the Obama Administration. And it would have done so entirely with private funds rather than the Administrations increasingly ill-fated and ham-handed attempts at venture capitalism with taxpayer funds. The fact of the matter is that, for the foreseeable future, opposing fossil fuels is equivalent to opposing energy use.

The Keystone decision only makes sense in the context of a general push to limit energy supply and roll back our industrial economy and all its amazing gifts. Part and parcel of this same effort has been the growing opposition to natural gas fracking. Fracking is an underground procedure that has been used safely and succesfully for decades to extend the life of older oil wells. Fracking is one reason that serial predictions of older fields “running out of oil” have been repeatedly incorrect.

It is as if President Obama has no interest in seeing the United States succeed unless it is the government that is funding and controlling energy projects.
Meyer makes another great point in contrasting President Obama's interest in high speed rail compared to a simple underground pipeline that is undoubtedly far less intrusive and with fewer environmental negatives than a rail line in California.

Does anyone doubt that had this exact same route been for high speed rail, rather than a pipeline, it would already have been approved and President Obama likely would have been proposing to throw a pile of taxpayer money at it to boot? This despite the fact that high-speed rail almost certainly has more environmental negatives than an underground pipeline. The route has always been a red herring — the real goal is reducing energy supply.

I find the contrast between the California High Speed Rail line and the Keystone XL pipeline to be simply amazing. In the case of the rail line, the Obama administration continues to try to perform CPR on an infrastructure project that makes no sense, is way to costly, and will likely bankrupt the state of California with all the taxpayer money required. In the case of the pipeline, the Obama administration killed a private infrastructure project that is widely supported, covers its own costs, and requires no taxpayer money.

It really comes down to a simple question.  Do you want your smartphone or the stone age?  As I wrote in "It Is Not A Pipe Dream" it is energy that makes our economy go.  We need it for anything we want to do.  It needs to be available and it needs to be affordable.  Energy is the engine for jobs and jobs growth.  Without it you are going nowhere in creating jobs.

You also need energy to blow dry your hair, surf the internet and charge up your iPhone and Prius.  The extremists who oppose projects like Keystone want the stone age.  Alternative energy only accounts for about 1% of total energy sources.  Hydroelectric is another 6%.  The remaining 93% is from oil (38%), coal (26%), gas (23%) and nuclear (6%).   I am all for developing all forms of energy including all forms of alternative energy.  However, we would be in the stone age without carbon based energy and this is not going to change for the foreseeable future.

The irony is that as the liberals blog away on the evils of carbon-based and nuclear energy on their iPad (recently charged by power supplied by a nuclear power plant), drinking an herbal tea (the water boiled on a natural gas stove), before they drive their child to school (of course, they could not put precious Asher on a school bus) in their Volvo (recently filled up at their neighborhood Citgo station), they are oblivious as to what really makes the world work.