Why Obama Will Lose by the Gallon

Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler

Friday, 01 June 2012

How many gas stations do you pass by on an average day?  For most folks it's several.  Dozens every week, a couple of hundred or more every month.  Every one of them throughout America is loudly displaying a campaign ad against President Zero.  Look at the next gas station you drive by and you'll see the campaign ad shouting at you - wordlessly, for the ad consists only of numbers.  It's the price per gallon. This is the best campaign ad ever - a daily infuriating reminder of what a ruinous loser Zero has been as a president, and what his presidency is costing you in real money.  Plus it's free - neither the Romney campaign nor the GOP Super-Pacs have to spend a dime on them.  All they have to do is turn the negative ad against Zero into a positive ad for Romney. The question is:  Can they do it?  Can Romney do it himself, and persuasively? Recently, NPR compared his previous energy policy as Massachusetts governor (2003-2007) to today, claiming he has "shifted."  Back then, he focused on energy conservation and fuel efficiency, while seeming to buy in, at least partially, into "CO2 as a pollutant" warmism.  Today, instead, his emphasis is on energy production. It would be hard, however, to characterize this (as NPR implies) as a flip-flop, as much else has "shifted" over the last several years.  Since then, warmism has been repeatedly exposed as a hoax, while new extraction technology has increased America's energy resources enormously. Here is the Romney campaign's statement on enery policy.  It's not bad as a start.  Two of his regulatory reforms are critical:  yanking CO2 out of the Clean Air Act, and forcing enviro laws to do cost-benefit analyses. The former ends carbon dioxide's demonization as a "pollutant," warmism's key contention.  The latter ends the application of enviro regs no matter what the cost. His proposals to increase energy production focus exclusively on "carbon-based" sources, meaning oil, gas, and coal.  Not a word on ethanol, algae, wind, solar, and other "alternative" scams.  "Open America's energy reserves" means, "Drill, baby, drill," while special attention is paid to preventing "overregulation" of fracking (meaning, "Frack, baby, frack"). His R&D proposals are a clever finesse, shunting money now funding the whole alternative energy racket away from crony capitalists and giving it to the US military via DARPA. So far, so okay-but it sure doesn't tap into the fury and frustration folks feel when they see those pump prices.  That's what he needs to do. He stepped up his energy game today (5/31) with a surprise appearance in front of the shuttered Solyndra building in Fremont, California (north of San Jose).  Calling it a Taj Mahal built with taxpayer money, $500 million of which Zero poured into Solyndra, Romney said it's a symbol not of success, but of failure, an apt symbol of a failed presidency.  Solyndra, he continued, "is also a symbol of how the president thinks about free enterprise. Free enterprise to the president means taking money from the taxpayers and giving it freely to his friends."  Mr. Obama doesn't believe in real capitalism.  He believes instead in "what I call ‘crony capitalism.' Give money to your friends who contributed to your campaign. That's crony capitalism." Nailing Zero's utter failure on "green energy," and on being a corrupt politician - nice two-fer.  Yet that still doesn't fix the blame on Zero for those pump prices, nor does it clearly and forcefully explain what Romney would do to bring them down, way down. How should he do that?  It's easy. First, at every opportunity using maps, charts, precise data, experts' quotes, hammer it into voters' brains that America has the largest energy resources of any country in the world - dwarfing not just Saudi Arabia, but the rest of the entire world combined. Earlier this month (5/11), the director of natural resources for the federal government's GAO (Government Accountability Office), Anu Mittal, testified at a Congressional hearing that one single region in the West (the Green River Formation where Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado join) contains 1.5 trillion barrels of recoverable oil, which is "equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves." Here is a map and short description of the formation. Most of it is on federal land.  In 2008, President George Bush opened up 2 million acres of the Green River Formation for shale oil and tar sands.  One of the very first acts of Zero's Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in early 2009 was to block this, claiming that the leases must be reviewed.  Simultaneously, he encouraged environmental groups to file federal lawsuits to prevent its development. Then, of course, there is natural gas, reserves of which have grown literally astronomically in just the last few years thanks to fracking.  The US consumes some 22 tcf (trillion cubic feet) per year now, and already drillers estimate US gas reserves are about 100 times that or close to 2.2 quadrillion cubic feet (100 years' supply) - with discovery of new plays outrunning increased consumption. And once again,  Zero and Salazar are encouraging enviro groups to file lawsuits to block fracking gas wells, as well as encouraging BM journalists to demonize fracking in scare "news" stories. Not to mention Zero's hate of coal, of which we have staggeringly large amounts.  A hate that Coal Country in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania return towards President Cowpie. Put all this together, and it gives Romney an opportunity on a platinum platter to explain how he'll provide cheap and abundant energy for all Americans.  He'll issue EOs to dismantle all of Zero's and the EPA's rules and regs that stand in the way of lower gas bills, lower electric bills, lower pump prices.  Everyone except enviro-crazies and eco-fascists wants to pay less, way less at the pump.  It's an issue that Latinos, Blacks, Whites, working class, middle class, just about all of us are on the same side of.  Romney needs to make it his issue, he needs to own it, with passion and drama.  The price of energy affects close to everything in the economy.  Cheap and abundant energy makes widespread prosperity possible.  Costly and scarce energy makes widespread prosperity impossible.  If Romney can make passion for the former a constant campaign theme, while showing how and why Zero is an ideologue for the latter, he will defeat Zero by the gallon.  For every time a voter drives by a gas station and sees the pump price display, his or her determination to vote Zero out will be reinforced - day in and day out, all the way to November 6.