OPINION:
If Ronald Reagan were alive today, he would have turned to whoever was with him as President Obama finished his latest speech on climate change and “clean” energy and said, “Well, there he goes again.”
The only thing new about his pronouncements Monday in Las Vegas at outgoing Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid’s “National Clean Energy Summit” was the extra billion dollars in grants and loan guarantees available to his friends and supporters. Earlier Obama administration initiatives have already left U.S. taxpayers holding the bag for more than $2 billion in spectacular failures, federal courts have ruled that the government cannot in the name of saving the planet give solar energy producers immunity from laws making it illegal to kill eagles and migratory waterfowl and left families in coal producing states with the bleakest future imaginable.
In past speeches, the president has praised energy producers in this country who have revolutionized the world energy picture by turning the United States into the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, though they have had to do it not only without government help, but in the face of outright administration hostility. That hostility was on stark display Monday in La Vegas as the president announced that his administration was expediting applications for transmission lines to bring the solar and wind energy he favors to market.
One need only compare the speed with which he Interior Department and the Bureau of Land Management moved under White House pressure to allow transmission lines being sought by a huge solar energy producer in California to build a transmission line across federal property in Riverside County, California with the languishing request to build the Canadian pipeline.
Environmentalists who held up the construction of the highly subsidized Topaz Solar Farm near Joshua Tree National Park expressed surprise when the publicly available plans were very, very vague as to where the new transmission line to get the electricity generated there to market. Power transmission lines are often as controversial as power plants themselves and permitting can take years.
Since we’re talking about one of the president’s favored alternative power sources, however, his regulators have found a way to cut the red tape. But what about the need to license new clean energy producing nuclear plants or permission to build the pipelines and port facilities needed to export and sell the huge amounts of natural gas now being produced in this country?
The day may come when solar power is competitive in price with fossil fuel generated power, but that day is a long way off. Wind power and solar power exist today not because they are competitive or even all that great for the environment but because they receive massive subsidies from government. The Tesla, a marvelous electric car being built by an Obama booster, sells even at its high price to celebrities and the rich only because those who buy it are paying something like 30 percent less than they would have to pay but for money the company gets from the great Ford and Chevy driving middle class.
Mr. Obama is building his legacy on the backs of the American taxpayer and by building inefficiencies into an economy already struggling under the heavy hand of government planners and dreamers.
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