PJ Media

It’s time for Americans to choose whether we want the Sierra Club or our basic lifestyle. We can’t go along with radical strictures from extremist green activists and still afford to drive to work, let alone anywhere else. There are billions of barrels of petroleum in the U.S. that are untapped because the Congress has placed a moratorium on rulemaking for extraction of oil shale, which has been estimated to be available for about a third of where the world market for oil is now. Yes, this won’t help right away, but that’s not a reason for failing to start.

We have fiddled too long while this crisis was building, because the press was unwilling to differ from green orthodoxy. All the objections to exploratory drilling in ANWR are bogus. It’s a flat dreary marsh full of mosquitoes when it’s thawed and a frozen desert the rest of the time. Even the natives want us to drill there.
It won’t solve the main problem, but it will help while we’re building nuclear power plants and while we’re creating a new industry with thousands upon thousands of jobs in the oil shale areas.

Ultimately, I seems to me that the most sensible energy of the future is electricity, but the technology for cars that will replace what we expect of our gas powered buggies is still too expensive. The government doesn’t need to offer any gimicky prizes. The ones who develop the battery packs of tomorrow will get more than $300 million in stock options. We’ve got the distribution system mostly in place, but we need more transmission lines and more generation capacity because we haven’t been building them as needed. NIMBY and environmental lawsuits and lobbying again.

We should be exploring clean coal, since it’s one of our cheapest, most abundant fuels. We should be licensing new nuclear generators, and all the rest–another Project Apollo, but we should also be noticing that Cheney’s dictum was never more true than when applied to Al Gore and many other so-called conservationists who freely jet around the world attending Global Warming Conferences.

Consider the environmental community’s reaction to Planktos, Inc.’s proposal to fertilize plankton blooms in the ocean by releasing iron particles. I’m not saying the plan was necessarily a solution, but it deserved to be studied and encouraged as a relatively cheap way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Instead it was treated as if it were a return to whaling for oil and ambergris.

Thanks, Mr. Guillet, for bringing some hard headed reality to the discussion, because all we’ve been getting so far is denial and pretend.