U.S. Energy Policy Part I.

And then the Giant Magic Otters come and refill all the oil wells.


This snippet from tomorrow’s NYT (yes, I have a way-back machine and I have no compunction about using it.)

Bush puts his power behind energy plan
By Elisabeth Bumiller and Jad Mouawad The New York Times
FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2005
WASHINGTON
President George W. Bush has presented a plan to offer government risk insurance to companies that build nuclear power plants and to encourage the construction of oil refineries on closed military bases in the United States.
...
Bush also proposed on Wednesday giving the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the authority to choose sites for new terminals to receive liquefied natural gas from overseas.
...
Bush's proposals would not lower domestic gasoline prices this summer.
...

To be fair there’s also some weak rhetoric about using clean diesel, and tax breaks for this and that .

There are a lot of twisty, tricksey convolutions that go along with energy policy, but for the sake of conversation, lets focus on two.

Part One: Everyone in the Bush White House is a big, old oil slut.

Some, like Bush 43, are spectacularly inept and failed oil sluts, but like all idiot children of the corrupt and powerful, rich/stupid always fails upward, and the Head's of the Five Families found Fredo a gig pretending to run the country for eight years while they loot every loose nickel and floorboard.

The entire Bush family is treated like cross between cousins-with-privileges (if you know what I mean) and pet hamsters by the House of Saud.

Baron Vladimir Cheney of House Halliburton ran a company that started out as an oil instrument company.

Baron Cheney goes into the bunker with a handful of his oil buddies and lobbyists and rewrite U.S. energy policy...and it's barely a yawn. Funny, I remember when a certain Majority Political Party and a certain wide swath of Main Stream News Outlets went absolutely apeshit when they thought Hillary Clinton was doing exactly that with U.S. Health Care policy?

Condi Rice has a tanker named after her.

Of all the targets that a traumatized country was willing to give Preznit Fredo a blank check beat to death, he picked one that had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, but was a keystone in the international petroleum game.

This certainly isn't Startling New Information, and the list is much, much, much longer than this little cut, and make no mistake about it: put as much diesel-and-efficiency pig lipstick on this as you want, for them, "alternative sources of energy" means drilling.

Drilling deeper, further, harder.

Drilling until you hit the Earth’s Core. (Hey, maybe that’s a little corner of the Real Iraqi Plan: not only will we commandeer-by-proxy the second largest oil reserve in the world, but from there the C. Montgomery Bush Slant Drilling Company can angle under Iran and poach their reserves too. Sweet.)

If they all had made their fortunes working for King Cotton, and every single national policy happened to involve encouraging Americans consume Giant Cotton Underpants like whiskey at an Irish Wake, maybe someone in the intrepid MSM woulda noticed and maybe thought, "Hey, that's kind of odd?" But the MSM is currently busy chasing shiny objects and converting oxygen into carbon dioxide and such.

So everyone knows this, and yet we watch it unfold like a nightmare, moving with a nightmare’s kind of persistently deranged, slow-motion momentum towards catastrophe. And the ones pushing it all towards the edge of the cliff smile, and nod and babble gibberish and are obviously insane or are working a Imperial Agenda...and go on and on and on.

So, for your consideration, an honest-to-God modest proposal, put gingerly forward, for changing the dynamic of U.S. energy policy: Tie Defense and DHS spending directly to Alterative Energy research.

1-to-1, 3-to-1, I don’t have a good sense of what the Golden Mean would be in this case, but make it a hard number and tie it by law to Defense and Homeland Security. Basic research, Manhattan Project/Apollo in scope and sale, and every time the Pentagon or the Spies Who Love Us want another billion or three, they have to hit the Alternative Energy Tip Jar. Hard.

Why Defense and DHS?

Because Iraq II: “The Wrath of Condi” is about oil.
And Iraq I: “Heaven can Kuwait” was about oil.
And installing the Shah was about oil.
And propping up a sociopath like Saddam to counterbalance the Ayatollah Khomeini after he deposed the Shah was about oil.
And the reasons the Palestinians have been pimped by their own Muslim/Arab brethren is about a lot of things…and one of those things is oil.
And Israel has an interesting lineage…with a more than a little petroleum in the patriarchy.
The war we have trapped ourselves into between a rouge element of House bin Laden’s and House Saud is about power…which means oil.
Our troops are garrisoned in within Frisbee distance of some of the holy sites in Islam because of oil.
We give a rat’s ass about the internal politics of Russian in no small measure due to oil.

See a pattern? Its very subtle, but if you look closely…

And this was all when oil was under $50/barrel. What happens when it hits $100? $150? $250? And our new, gigantic industrializing buddies on the other side of the planet – the ones that own most of our debt -- decide that the pie needs to be resliced.?

So our wars are going to be about oil, our foreign policy is going to be driven by oil, our economy is going to continue to be hostage to oil, and our environmental policies – the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the only planet we’ve got – will all continue to be sacrificed to the Oil God.
And the trend lines all point in one direction.

This being the case, who but an America-hating traitor could suggest that true alternative energy is any less tactically imperative than body armor, any less more strategically vital than any missile defense system could possibly be, and any less patriotic than any damned flag?