{"id":4454,"date":"2011-03-31T04:13:50","date_gmt":"2011-03-31T11:13:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=4454"},"modified":"2011-03-31T04:13:50","modified_gmt":"2011-03-31T11:13:50","slug":"obama-mostly-wrong-on-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2011\/03\/31\/obama-mostly-wrong-on-energy\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama Mostly Wrong on Energy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday President Barack Obama announced his new energy policy.  Some parts are sound like increased fuel efficiency and increased conservation, but the bulk of the plan depends on fossil fuels, including a potentially disastrous expansion of offshore drilling.  Sufficient energy is meaningless in the absence of a viable planet on which to use it.<\/font><\/p>\n

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\"31green\"President Obama on Wednesday called for a one-third cut in oil imports by 2020, part of a plan he says will reduce U.S. dependence on foreign petroleum.<\/p>\n

With rising gasoline prices at home and political turmoil throughout the Middle East, Obama sought in a speech at Georgetown University to rally Americans – and bickering lawmakers – behind a program that draws equally from energy savings and increases in energy production<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

"We’ve been down this road before," Obama said, acknowledging that past presidents have made similar calls for greater energy independence. But, he added, "We can’t rush to action when gas prices are high and then hit the snooze button when prices are low again."<\/p>\n

Most facets of his proposals are familiar. The president proposed wider use of natural gas<\/strong>, including incentives to use it to fuel fleet vehicles such as city buses. He backed greater production of biofuels and vowed to establish at least four commercial scale refineries producing cellulosic ethanol<\/strong> or advanced biofuels within the next two years. <\/p>\n

He also pledged to establish higher fuel-efficiency standards<\/strong> for heavy trucks, just as he did for passenger vehicles early in his administration.<\/p>\n

Obama also urged oil companies to make greater use of the federal leases both onshore and offshore<\/strong> to prop up domestic oil output. The oil industry and GOP lawmakers have been loudly complaining about delays in the permitting of offshore drilling in recent months. <\/p>\n

But an irked administration, which had pledged tougher scrutiny of drilling applications after last year’s massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, fired back Tuesday with an Interior Department report that revived earlier debates about whether oil companies were exploiting the leases they already have.<\/p>\n

"We just spent all that time, energy and money trying to clean up a big mess," Obama said. "I don’t know about you, but I don’t have amnesia. I remember these things. I think it’s important that we prevent something like that from happening again."\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <San Francisco Chronicle<\/a>><\/p>\n

I have no problem with using natural gas as a bridge fuel, but tight prohibitions against fracking are needed to protect ground water.  Ethanol requires as much energy to make as it delivers in the tank, making it inefficient.  It also takes resources away from food production.  Increasing domestic oil production in no way lessens imports.  As soon as it\u2019s out of the ground it joins the the international market and becomes a generic commodity.  Because we will need some oil long term, we\u2019re actually better off keeping our reserves for a time when oil is much more scarce.  Worse yet, the equipment and disaster recovery plans for offshore drilling are unchanged since BP flooded the Gulf with oil.  None of the needed preventive measures are in place.<\/font><\/p>\n

Rachel Maddow explains these problems.<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/font><\/p>\n

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news<\/a>, world news<\/a>, and news about the economy<\/a><\/p>\n

Her analysis is clear.  The promised new safety standards do not exist.<\/font><\/p>\n

On the plus side, he did not hype nuclear plants.<\/font><\/p>\n

The biggest flaw in Obama\u2019s policy is what it does not contain.  We need to make the same kind of national effort we did to put a man on the moon.  We need to direct that effort into scientific research to develop the next generation of abundant, inexpensive, environmentally safe energy. I suspect that fusion may be the answer.  Whatever it is we won\u2019t get it from Republicans.  They are too busy insuring that the energy companies that own them stay profitable, and they hate skience [spelling intentional].<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday President Barack Obama announced his new energy policy.  Some parts are sound like increased fuel efficiency and increased conservation, but the bulk of the plan depends on fossil fuels, including a potentially disastrous expansion of offshore drilling.  Sufficient energy is meaningless in the absence of a viable planet on which to use it. President […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}