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A "Mean Green", Obama Wages War Against Cheap Energy

This article is more than 10 years old.

You know who the “mean greens” are. They are those curmudgeonly misanthropes who begrudge and bewail humankind’s economic progress and the high standards of living attained in the modern era.

President Obama is a mean green. Indeed, he sounds like one of their leaders when he tells us there is something wrong with Americans living so comfortably when there are poor nations in the world. In his words: “We can’t drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes, you know, 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that every other country is going to say OK ... [when we] keep using 25 percent of the world’s energy.”

Given that Obama disapproves of Americans’ affluence, it isn’t surprising that he appointed one of the meanest greens of all to be his science advisor—John Holdren, who comes from the extreme branch of environmentalism that openly advocates the “de-development” of the United States.

Since abundant, relatively inexpensive energy has literally powered America’s unprecedented economic development, naturally, one of Obama’s principal goals as president has been to curtail Americans’ access to cheap energy. He seems to agree with Holdren’s some-time writing partner, Paul Ehrlich, who burnished his misanthropic reputation by fulminating, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

Obama’s preferred strategy has been to implement whatever policies increase the price of energy to American consumers. He proved this by striving mightily to impose a cap-and-trade program on fossil fuels so that “if somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can, but it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

Obama’s animus against fossil fuels explains why he chose Dr. Steven Chu to be his Secretary of Energy. Chu’s most famous policy goal is encapsulated in his statement, “Somehow we have to figure out a way to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

To help Chu achieve his goal of hammering Americans with much higher fuel prices, Obama appointed the like-minded former Colorado senator Ken Salazar to be his Secretary of the Interior.

In his first week as president, Obama rescinded a Bush executive order that permitted drilling on the continental shelf. A few weeks later, Salazar unilaterally canceled 77 oil and gas leases in Utah, expressing his dread that some poor soul might catch a glimpse of drilling equipment from a national park more than a mile away.

Team Obama continued the assault on domestic oil development, first by adding two million more acres to the 107 million acres of designated wilderness to block the extraction of fossil fuels from those tracts; then using the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico as a pretext to block or delay the return of American oil rigs to the Gulf; then delaying the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to transport Canadian oil sands to be refined in Oklahoma. Most recently, Salazar’s department disclosed a new plan to offer only 15 offshore drilling leases. That is a record low, and appears to be the absolute minimum that can be offered under existing law.

Earlier this summer, there was some speculation that Obama was going to dip into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower the price of gasoline temporarily. Had he done this, it would have been one of the most cynical presidential maneuvers of all time. The only “national emergency” that confronted the country this summer was the possibility of the president losing his bid for reelection—an emergency so serious that he considered dipping into the SRP to help him get reelected so that he can resume his efforts to jack up the price of gasoline to European levels (a goal toward which Team Obama has made notable progress, although at $4.00 per gallon, we’re still only halfway to Chu’s lofty target price).

Obama’s EPA Director, Lisa Jackson, is well on her way to delivering a knockout punch to the already-reeling coal industry by imposing stricter emission standards on coal. EPA regulations already have triggered the announced closures of 175 coal-fired generators over the next few years, plus the cancellation of plans to build new, cleaner plants. Having wounded the coal industry and curbed domestic oil exploration, Team Obama is two-thirds of the way to clamping down on Americans’ fossil fuel usage.

But a funny thing happened on the way to renewable energy nirvana: technological breakthroughs led to a massive increase in the amount of natural gas being produced domestically. You might think that Team Obama would accept this development (if not be particularly delighted with it) since natural gas emits significantly less carbon dioxide than coal and oil, but you would be wrong. On the contrary, the mean greens have declared war against natural gas. Obama’s allies in the Sierra Club have headed the public relations campaign, launching a plan that they call “Beyond Natural Gas.”

It wasn’t that long ago that Al Gore and other mean greens designated natural gas as the fossil fuel of the future, but now that it is turning out to be superabundant, and therefore has become dirt-cheap, they have turned against it with a vengeance. The Sierra report announces, “We’re going to be preventing new gas plants from being built wherever we can.” More quietly, White House energy aide Heather Zichal followed up with an announcement this summer that Salazar’s Interior Department will unveil new rules regulating “fracking” sometime after the election.

Clearly, Team Obama is waging unrelenting war against cheap energy for Americans. In my next column, I’ll suggest a possible different national energy plan.

Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.