I love this topic & I love posting things like this--a bit I found in the Notable & Quotable section of the Wall Street Journal, Jon Basil Utley writing in at Reason.com:
It's only a matter of time before President Barack Obama's vast popularity runs aground on his energy policies. In the name of saving the planet from global warming, he has delayed new oil drilling, an action that will have major political repercussions once the world economy recovers. Instead of using some [of] the stimulus billions to produce more gas and oil, Obama's wild-eyed supporters dream of "renewable" energy derived from corn, wind, sunshine, and even grass.History suggests that markets will always find a cheap source of energy.
With the appointment of extremists like climate czar Carol Browner and science adviser John Holdren, Obama has placed his administration's environmental policy in the hands of radicals. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proposes replacing oil and coal with windmills. Yet Barron's recently reported that America would need to build 500,000 giant offshore windmills and transmission lines to produce Salazar's specified 1,900 gigawatts of electricity. In contrast, oil and gas drilling could provide hundreds of thousands of solid, well-paying blue-collar jobs. . . .
All of these things are happening at a time when natural gas is abundant and cheap. The new technology of horizontal fraccing has made it economically feasible to drill into vast shale deposits in many states, even famously difficult ones like Michigan and New York. Many cars could run on natural gas, much like many buses do already. On a recent trip to Peru, I learned that most taxicabs have been converted to natural gas for a cost of about $1,000 each. New technologies continually revive old oil and gas fields and make new ones economically viable. So it's little more than socialist Malthusianism to argue that the world is running out of cheap energy. Science will always find and harness new sources.
As for me and my blog, I'll stick with the historically overwhelming power of the market, over the liberty-taking, economy-destroying, command & control social engineers in the Obama administration.
Cap & trade, in addition to being pointless from an "environmental" perspective and incredibly costly (effectively a huge tax on American families), is at its core an opportunity for your intellectual betters in the Obama administration to take control of a huge section of the American economy and your lives.
You see, they're smarter and more enlightened than you & me are and thus, should be controlling an ever-increasing portion of our lives.
It's about power & control: They own/run/influence a huge section of the financial industry as a result of TARP, etc., and now effectively control Chrysler. Next up? This is no secret. Government healthcare, cap & trade and other stuff I'm forgetting at the moment.
