Obama’s Smokin’ Weed Again

I have to admit, the man has guts. If I were Obama, the last place I would want to be seen would be a gas station. Yet, here he is, lecturing America about energy independence at an Indiana gas station.

That takes a whole lot of hutzpah, particularly since gas prices have doubled during his administration. Want a chuckle? When gas prices rose during the Bush administration, Obama was the first to tear Bush up and yell for him to get prices down. Now that gas prices have increased far more under his own administration, he says that there’s nothing a president can do about gas prices!

At least Bush did something about it. When oil hit $145 per barrel on July 14, 2008, Bush opened up more areas for offshore drilling. He also lifted the provisions of the Jones Act, which required that all ships transporting cargo between US ports be US flagged and manned. Gas prices dropped 50% within a few months.

Obama could do the same thing to mitigate the current gas price emergency. But his union buddies would not approve, and he never does anything that would upset them.

And he certainly will not allow more oil drilling, because that would upset his environmental buddies - and he never does anything that would upset them.

I know, I know, he has repeated ad nauseum the lie that his administration has opened up new areas to drilling and that more oil has been drilled under his leadership than ever before. Typical political lies. The only areas he has opened up are ones where there is a very low likelihood of oil being found. And the oil that has been pumped in the last three years is a carryover from the prior administration.

OBAMA DOES NOT WANT THE US TO DRILL ITS OWN OIL. Otherwise he would have opened up ANWAR, high likelihood offshore sites, and drilling on publicly owned land (our land) that has proven oil reserves.

Why is Arab oil (the payment for which supports terrorists) good and American oil bad? Why is it bad for Americans to drill off our own shores, but OK for Venezuela and Cuba (both of which hate us) to drill there? Does he think they have superior technology to the US to prevent oil spills? Give me a break!

What Obama SAYS is that he wants fuel made from algae, wind and solar. And he wants battery operated cars.

Let’s examine that. An energy expert, who is both a supporter of alternative energy and of Obama, was interviewed on the FOX business channel this week. She was asked what percentage of miles driven now and in the future would be powered by alternative energy. She was honest enough to admit that the figure today would be “less than 1/10 of one percent,” and that it might grow to one percent in the next five years. But she hastened to say that she believed that alternative energy sources for automobiles are “the future.”

She’s right. Even though we have proven oil reserves in the ground to power our automobiles for many decades, the greenies will eventually get their way. Millions of barrels of our oil will stay wasted in the ground, and we will power our vehicles with energy that costs three to four times what gasoline would cost.

But we are not anywhere near that point now. When you add in the cost of the technology and the batteries (even after $10,000 government subsidies), battery powered vehicles are decades away from being competitive with gas. And if they were, where does he think the electricity to charge the batteries comes from? The majority comes from coal-fired plants.

What about solar, wind and algae? I could get into having a windmill bolted to the roof of my car, couldn’t you? But what if there was no wind one day? Perhaps I could drive a REALLY BIG car that would be large enough to have multiple solar panels on its roof. But what if the clouds covered the sun? OK, then algae has to be the answer, right? Puleeze… Oil would have to be at $850 a barrel for algae to be a reasonable alternative. I don’t think even Obama could mess things up badly enough to get oil that high.

Jonah Goldberg, Editor of National Review, has said that Obama’s energy policy is “fundamentally incoherent.” In a recent interview he was asked if the White House is worried that high gas prices will hurt Obama’s chances of re-election. He replied:

“I think they're in something of a panic over it. We've seen his poll numbers drop precipitously. And you can't prove it, but most people think the gas thing is a major driver of it. The problem is that he’s beyond doubling down, he's tripling down on the same stuff he was saying three years ago, and it's fundamentally incoherent. He's saying that we need to switch to wind and solar and this is vital for our energy strategy, except we don't use wind and solar to move cars in this country. Oil is a transportation fuel, not windmills.”

Let’s check out Obama’s energy policy and track record. See if you think he’s been smoking something illegal to come up with this stuff.

Acting as CEO of General Motors, Obama ordered the company to push the Chevy Volt. He stood in their plant and declared that the Volt was the “car of the future,” and that he was going to buy one himself when he was no longer president. (Oh, Lord, let him buy a Volt, real soon, is my prayer.) This was a car nobody wanted except Barrack Hussein Obama, and since he had fired the real CEO, GM obeyed. People weren’t buying the sorry thing, so he ordered government subsidies. A FOX News reporter who was given one to test, ran out of battery in the middle of the Lincoln tunnel – twice. After producing a pitiful 7,000 of the car, GM finally defied Obama and stopped producing them. In the process they laid off hundreds of workers, another accomplishment for the great man.

Of course we are all familiar with the Solyndra scandal. Obama stood in their plant and proclaimed that their panel was the future of solar. Never mind that it cost far more than everyone else’s panel. Never mind that the half billion dollars Obama gave them was used to build, among other luxuries, an over-the-top gym for the executives. Or that they went bankrupt not long after he pressured the Energy Department, which was skeptical, to give them the loan. Is it possible that they were already having problems? The fact is that the loan was refinanced in February of 2011, and six months later they were bankrupt.

I’m certain that the fact that billionaire George Kaiser, an Obama fundraiser, is one of Solyndra’s big investors had nothing to do with the special treatment Solyndra received from Obama. And the fact that his administration allowed private investors to get paid in front of you and me, the taxpayers who gave the government loan. That is not only wrong – it is illegal. The government, by law, is supposed to be the first paid in any loan guarantee situation. But Obama claims to be a law expert, so I guess he thinks he’s above the law. And let’s not forget that thousands of employees lost their jobs in this debacle.

What about his oft-repeated policy statement that oil is “The fuel of the past”? Maybe it is, but it is also the fuel of the foreseeable future, unless you’re wearing green-tinted glasses. There is not one credible scientist or engineer that thinks there is even a slight possibility that algae or solar or wind or batteries will replace oil in the next ten years. So what future is our eagle-eyed president gazing upon?

One other thing that should give us some insight into the way the Socialist-in-Chief thinks. He chose an Energy Secretary (Steven Chu) who has publicly called for US gasoline prices to be at “European levels.” That’s $8 to $10 per gallon folks. (Chu is, no surprise, from Berkeley, the fount of all liberal idiocy.) Obama himself stated when he was running for office that he wanted gas prices to go higher. There’s only one reason why Obama and Chu would want Americans to suffer like that – to force us to accept other high-cost alternatives. (News flash: Now that this is becoming an election issue, the good Secretary has changed his mind about the issue. Without denying his earlier position, he said that now, “as an official of the government,” he wants gas to go down.)

ANWAR could produce a million barrels of oil a day – but Obama won’t let us drill there, even though it can be done in a caribou-friendly way. The Keystone pipeline project would have lowered energy costs in the South dramatically, and created at least 20,000 jobs. But Obama’s environmental wacko friends said “No!” even though a sister pipeline has been operating safely for years.

The one good thing I can say about Obama’s “incoherent” energy policy is that it’s likely to hurt him in the upcoming election. His job approval rating is only 47% overall. It’s worse when it comes to the way Americans think he has handled the economy: Only 42% approve. But his approval rating is truly abysmal with regard to his handling of the gas price crisis: 26%. That means that a whole bunch of Democrats disapprove, too. (I’m chuckling as I recount this. Isn’t it great that occasionally Americans see through the lies of political phonies?)