National Insanity?
National insanity? 5/27/2008
A comment made by our President, George W. Bush, a while back when he urged the USA "to get off oil", strikes me as bizarre, coming from our Government's Chief Executive. It was a poor choice of words, I'm sure, because we can no more "get off" oil than we can "get off" food. Then the news article went on to say, correctly, that we must do this because we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. That indeed is the crux of our problem. So why haven't we done that years ago already and what has been holding up this parade.??
The relatively short answer to this question is the current political and media power of those who believe that Western civilization has been ravaging Mother Earth and needs to be stopped. They claim that mankind is bad for nature and causing the world to warm up as a result, although there is no convincing scientific evidence that this is so, notwithstanding the loud cries to the contrary by the "Earth-Firsters" who claim to know better. That's all sales talk.
But during the past 30 years or so they have found ways to impose ever broader restrictions on our society under the banner of saving the environment, including the air we breathe. Who can disagree with that? But what their efforts and claims really amount to and what is ultimately their final objective, is to make us severely reduce the use of fossil fuels, coal, nuclear power etc. which make modern civilization possible. This is not based on any reputable science, it is their deeply held but misguided belief, like a phony religion. Such attitudes make reasoning difficult.
Because the rich Western world has plenty of people who can dedicate their time and efforts to such a cause, "environmentalism" became the early weapon to this end and has since merged with the global warming crowd.
These environmentalists, you might call them the eco-crowd, have been extraordinarily clever and successful in thwarting our power industry's efforts to stay one step ahead of growing demands for energy for our expanding population. When global warming came along the eco-crowd were quick to steer the media and many sympathetic politicians in the direction of a less "polluting" and simpler way of life by severely reducing coal and fossil fuel use.
But, we now may have reached a moment in time when we literally put ourselves on the road to political impotence as a great power, since we put ourselves more and more at the mercy of our overseas oil suppliers to the point where the President of the USA has to pay visits to the oil Sheiks asking them to please open the oil spigots some more. And then he is REFUSED. If this is not embarrassing to a great country that uses its own military to defend those oil barons from some of their unsavory neighbors, I don't know what is?? And now the European Union, another one of our stalwart allies, is moving once more to force the USA to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Obviously there is more at work here than meets the eye. If we do not turn back from this Kyoto Protocol nonsense it will tie us down like Swift's Gulliver.
This, in my and many others' opinion is the real cause of our current dilemma. Because so much personal effort and time of all these "greens, media honchos, politicians and global warmers" has gone into this effort they will stop at nothing and do almost anything to prevent their losing this ball game. Only very strong political leadership may be able to put this genie back into the bottle! And the sooner the better.
Major parts of our western population have been thoroughly misled for years already by certain intellectually dishonest scientists, politicians and media figures. The public has been subjected for so long to one scary, doomsday scenario after another that it probably does not believe anybody anymore. It sits and waits for whatever to happen. But that is no future for a great, fundamentally good and powerful country to contemplate. We Americans must realize that we are being had by a big bunch of very self-serving, power-hungry people, interested only in driving the USA into the One World embrace of the United Nations.
We will be shackled, impotent and despised for ever. Is that why our Founding Fathers created the USA? Shame on us.
5/26/2008
Action plan
We must develop a Manhattan type project about energy independence. Call it Project USA, but this time with the government supporting it, not controlling it. Our energy industry is more than capable of doing what they have been waiting to do for years already. The primary objective is to rapidly increase production of fossil fuels as well as nuclear power, clean coal and any other energy source that could be competitive without government subsidies on the North American Continent. We have lots of all of these!!
1 Our economy, as it exists, needs to be kept operating at full tilt on the conventional fuels of today for a long time yet.
2 Currently popular and heavily subsidized "alternative" energy sources should be phased out or turned over to unsubsidized private investors. These alternatives are not the answer. Only more conventional fossil fuel will save our economy, industry and defense posture, whether we like it or not.
3 To increase fossil fuel production and refining and to build many more nuclear and clean coal power plants and their associated infrastructure will take many years and huge investments. To get really moving on this project, permitting processes would need to be significantly improved and speeded up. NIMBY objections, except in extreme cases, should not be allowed to hold up construction plans.
A comment made by our President, George W. Bush, a while back when he urged the USA "to get off oil", strikes me as bizarre, coming from our Government's Chief Executive. It was a poor choice of words, I'm sure, because we can no more "get off" oil than we can "get off" food. Then the news article went on to say, correctly, that we must do this because we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. That indeed is the crux of our problem. So why haven't we done that years ago already and what has been holding up this parade.??
The relatively short answer to this question is the current political and media power of those who believe that Western civilization has been ravaging Mother Earth and needs to be stopped. They claim that mankind is bad for nature and causing the world to warm up as a result, although there is no convincing scientific evidence that this is so, notwithstanding the loud cries to the contrary by the "Earth-Firsters" who claim to know better. That's all sales talk.
But during the past 30 years or so they have found ways to impose ever broader restrictions on our society under the banner of saving the environment, including the air we breathe. Who can disagree with that? But what their efforts and claims really amount to and what is ultimately their final objective, is to make us severely reduce the use of fossil fuels, coal, nuclear power etc. which make modern civilization possible. This is not based on any reputable science, it is their deeply held but misguided belief, like a phony religion. Such attitudes make reasoning difficult.
Because the rich Western world has plenty of people who can dedicate their time and efforts to such a cause, "environmentalism" became the early weapon to this end and has since merged with the global warming crowd.
These environmentalists, you might call them the eco-crowd, have been extraordinarily clever and successful in thwarting our power industry's efforts to stay one step ahead of growing demands for energy for our expanding population. When global warming came along the eco-crowd were quick to steer the media and many sympathetic politicians in the direction of a less "polluting" and simpler way of life by severely reducing coal and fossil fuel use.
But, we now may have reached a moment in time when we literally put ourselves on the road to political impotence as a great power, since we put ourselves more and more at the mercy of our overseas oil suppliers to the point where the President of the USA has to pay visits to the oil Sheiks asking them to please open the oil spigots some more. And then he is REFUSED. If this is not embarrassing to a great country that uses its own military to defend those oil barons from some of their unsavory neighbors, I don't know what is?? And now the European Union, another one of our stalwart allies, is moving once more to force the USA to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Obviously there is more at work here than meets the eye. If we do not turn back from this Kyoto Protocol nonsense it will tie us down like Swift's Gulliver.
This, in my and many others' opinion is the real cause of our current dilemma. Because so much personal effort and time of all these "greens, media honchos, politicians and global warmers" has gone into this effort they will stop at nothing and do almost anything to prevent their losing this ball game. Only very strong political leadership may be able to put this genie back into the bottle! And the sooner the better.
Major parts of our western population have been thoroughly misled for years already by certain intellectually dishonest scientists, politicians and media figures. The public has been subjected for so long to one scary, doomsday scenario after another that it probably does not believe anybody anymore. It sits and waits for whatever to happen. But that is no future for a great, fundamentally good and powerful country to contemplate. We Americans must realize that we are being had by a big bunch of very self-serving, power-hungry people, interested only in driving the USA into the One World embrace of the United Nations.
We will be shackled, impotent and despised for ever. Is that why our Founding Fathers created the USA? Shame on us.
5/26/2008
Action plan
We must develop a Manhattan type project about energy independence. Call it Project USA, but this time with the government supporting it, not controlling it. Our energy industry is more than capable of doing what they have been waiting to do for years already. The primary objective is to rapidly increase production of fossil fuels as well as nuclear power, clean coal and any other energy source that could be competitive without government subsidies on the North American Continent. We have lots of all of these!!
1 Our economy, as it exists, needs to be kept operating at full tilt on the conventional fuels of today for a long time yet.
2 Currently popular and heavily subsidized "alternative" energy sources should be phased out or turned over to unsubsidized private investors. These alternatives are not the answer. Only more conventional fossil fuel will save our economy, industry and defense posture, whether we like it or not.
3 To increase fossil fuel production and refining and to build many more nuclear and clean coal power plants and their associated infrastructure will take many years and huge investments. To get really moving on this project, permitting processes would need to be significantly improved and speeded up. NIMBY objections, except in extreme cases, should not be allowed to hold up construction plans.
posted by Schaesberg at 8:51 AM
<< Home