Under pressure from Republicans, he embraced offshore drilling — just weeks before the BP oil spill. He offered support for nuclear power, only to watch a disaster unfold in Japan. Gas price hikes in the spring disrupted his economic message. Feeling the heat from Republicans again, he infuriated his green base by bailing out on a long-promised ozone standard.
Essentially, every time he heads down the path of towards sort of energy policy, he gets cracked in the jaw. Nearly all of this is beyond his control anyway (Libya, Tsunami, China's solar drive vs. Solyndra). At this point, I'd say he's pretty gun shy anyway so why not simply give up.
I'm serious. There's not much that he really needs to do. The world's energy market is heading towards green technology whether people (see: the right)like it or not. With the supply of oil and coal limited, the next fifty years are going to see a shift to new forms of technology. As the cost of processing these new forms of energy drops due to more investment from multinational corporations, the free market will do what it always does.
If he feels the urge to do anything, he should simply funnel it all through the Department of Defense. The strides in innovation they are taking are amazing and can easily be supported by defense dollars-something that the GOP would never dare cut.
So, the president should simply like his wounds, learn from his mistakes, and focus on jobs and the economy. Tackling energy has always been a disaster for him and his goals are going to be realized even if he does nothing.
2 comments:
The problem with "doing nothing" is that the coal, oil and gas industries won't stand idly by. They will do everything they can to keep us hooked on fossil fuels. They will continue to press for drilling in increasingly sensitive areas like the arctic and off the coast of Florida, use techniques like fracking that have disastrous environmental effects -- carcinogenic benzene in people's drinking water, and putting tar sand pipelines through places like the Ogallala aquifer, which even Nebraska's Republican governor Dave Heineman opposes.
And if you think the DoD is a model of efficiency and brilliance, you obviously have never worked for a company that supplies the Defense Department. There are literally thousands of dead-end military projects that we have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on. Don't you remember the $600 toilet seats? The Joint Strike Fighter boondoggle? The Osprey boondoggle? All the billions wasted on KBR in Iraq? The planeloads of hundred dollar bills that were sent to Iraq, which all just disappeared without any accounting?
I'm not saying the military is worse than any other government agency or corporate bureaucracy -- I'm saying it's the same. They're so used to getting unlimited amounts of cash shoveled down their gullets for the last 10 years, there's going to be a lot complacency, especially in the civilian contracting arm of the Pentagon.
The world's energy market is heading towards green technology whether people (see: the right)like it or not.
I wasn't aware that the right opposed the market coming to that conclusion. I thought the opposition was to the govt forcing it upon the market. Or is there no difference in your mind?
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