Washington Times: War on energy at home creates disasters abroad

News
September 25, 2011
By Sol Sanders - Special to The Washington TimesANALYSIS/OPINION:President Obama’s war on fossil fuels is adding to instability in a world already racked by international debt, demographic pressures and unpredictable, galloping technological advances.The domestic implications of his policies are increasingly apparent: The closing off of prospecting and drilling is costing tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of jobs. The attempt to choose winners and losers through “green energy” subsidies is producing market distortions, huge losses of taxpayers’ funds and corruption rarely seen since the Soviet Union’s Gosplan. Using executive fiat for arbitrary environmental rulings after Mr. Obama’s “cap and trade” climate plan quietly died in Congress is eroding constitutional government by creating a precedent for defying public opinion as expressed through the legislative process.On the world scene, the impact is equally grim, with intricate politico-economic problems that are difficult to quantify.It is a given, of course, that world energy is, as the economists say, an imperfect market. The imperfections run the gamut: President Hugo Chavez gives 100,000 barrels of oil a day to his ideological buddy Fidel Castro to keep Havana’s lights on from Venezuela’s production, which is also a principal source of American imports. Hand-me-down restrictive policies, a heritage of the Carter administration’s misbegotten Department of Energy and its first head, James R. Schlesinger, still dog the natural gas market. Cartelization of the industry, despite all the legislation and litigation since the Supreme Court broke up John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1911, continues to inhibit the competition that could challenge efforts by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to set production quotas to control prices.Read more here.