No Energy from this Executive

Watch what Obama does, not what he says. by Fred Barnes 06/15/2009, Volume 014, Issue 37

"As I've often said, in the short term, as we transition to renewable energy," President Obama stated in April, "we can and should increase our domestic production of oil and natural gas. .  .  . We still need more oil, we still need more gas. If we've got some here in the United States that we can use, we should find it and do so in an environmentally sustainable way."
Does anyone believe Obama was serious about this? Given his practice of misdirection--saying one thing, doing another--no one should have. Now, nearly five months into the Obama presidency, it's clear he didn't mean a word of it. His administration is impeding, not promoting, increased production of oil and gas, as it is of coal and nuclear power.
This is a crazy policy. It's likely to drive up gasoline and electricity prices while making America more dependent than ever on foreign oil--three bad trends. Energy independence becomes still another of Obama's stated policies being championed in words but not deeds.
Higher prices on oil and gas may make wind and solar power, the renewable sources of energy the Obama administration is promoting, more competitive, but only slightly. They would still be heavily reliant on large subsidies from the federal government, face severe technical problems, and produce energy only intermittently.
At the moment, demand for oil and gas is down and so is our capacity to produce them. As the economy improves, demand is bound to rise quickly. But capacity can be increased only gradually, and that's if more production is being encouraged rather than prevented.
To think that wind and solar or other alternative fuels can fill the energy gap requires a belief in what Adriel Bettelheim of Congressional Quarterly has called the "Tinkerbell effect," as in Peter Pan. It consists of believing something will happen just because you wish it would.
Wind and solar now provide less than 1 percent of America's energy needs. Obama has called for doubling this in three years, still leaving them as marginal sources of energy. The likelihood, based on projections by experts, is that oil and gas must be relied on overwhelmingly to meet the country's energy needs for at least two more decades.
But amazingly enough, the Obama administration is worried about domestic "overproduction" of oil and gas. According to its budgetary "green book," that would be "detrimental to longterm energy security and is also inconsistent with the administration's policy of reducing carbon emissions and encouraging the use of renewable energy sources."
So Obama has proposed removing all tax incentives to produce oil and gas, slapping a 13 percent excise tax on all energy derived from the Gulf of Mexico, and increasing the corporate tax rate by 3 percent on all companies that produce or process oil and gas.
Then there's what he's already done, starting with a delay for 180 days (and maybe more) in the five-year, outer continental shelf leasing plan.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar isn't excited about exploring and drilling for oil and gas. He boasted instead last week to Politico about finalizing "the rules for the development of offshore wind [power] here in the United States."
Salazar has cancelled 77 oil and gas leases that had been issued in Utah. He halted plans to lease the oil shale region in five states after a Shell Oil study concluded there are 1 to 2 trillion barrels there of recoverable oil. He declared the listing of the yellow-billed loon as an endangered species justified, which could limit the development of a huge oil-rich region off the west coast of Alaska.
But that's not all. The Obama administration has decided not to issue leases for gas well drilling on the Roan Plateau in Colorado and has shown little interest in developing the "Chukchi" region offshore north Alaska. (It is bogged down in the permitting process.)
Nuclear power? Obama has often said he's for it, but not until a way to deal with waste from nuclear power plants is found. In fact, one has been found and so designated by Washington at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Obama, however, has proposed to eliminate all federal funds for building a waste site there.
Coal? A Bush administration rule covering mountaintop coal mining was thrown out by the Obama administration as "legally defective."
One way to reduce the use of coal for electricity (thus limiting greenhouse gas emissions) is conversion of power plants to natural gas. For that to happen, the logical policy would be to spur more gas production. But that's not the Obama policy. On the contrary, the Obama policy is to make gas, oil, and coal more difficult to produce and more expensive for consumers. As for more nuclear power, the policy is, in effect: Forget it.
True, this isn't the way Obama describes his energy policies. With Obama, the trick is to watch what he does, not what he says.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.