How "Bout Them Gas Prices?

Here we go again on the high gas prices. Having fun yet? And isn't it nice to hear the chorus of Democratic voices singing the praises of these price increases? After all, as David Harsanyi points out:


"In 2008, Steven Chu, Obama's (and, sadly, our own) future secretary of energy (sic) lamented, 'Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.'"


townhall.com/columnists/davidharsanyi/2012/02/22/arent_high_gas_prices_what_democrats_want/page/full/


Nice job folks - you are definitely working on it! Give Obama another 4 years to knock out more pipelines and completely eliminate drilling in this country and we will be there! 


The usual response is that oil and gas are disappearing resources and we have to wean ourselves off them now to make it less of a jolt when they are gone completely. Really? Consider the following: 


"According to the Institute for Energy Research, there is enough natural gas in the U.S. to meet electricity demand for 575 years at current fuel demand, enough to fuel homes heated by natural gas for 857 years and more gas in the U.S. than there is in Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and some place called Turkmenistan combined. Oil? The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the United States could soon overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world's top oil producer. There are tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of offshore oil here at home -- and much more oil around the world."

I am quite confident that a shift to a different energy source will occur sometime in the next 500-800 or so years.

Then there is the other all-purpose excuse: Global Warming! Booga booga!! But the longer this excuse is used as a rationale for regulating just about everything, the more real science is making it out as the Big Lie and even green politicians are noticing. A former heavily green minister of the Social Democratic Party in Germany has recently questioned green orthodoxy based on scientific research about such silly ideas as the sun having something to do with heating the earth's atmosphere. He is, of course, paying a political price for his apostasy but mainline news magazines in Germany are starting to take a critical look at this subject and discovering that maybe things aren't quite as greenies have represented. 

finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2012/02/22/another_enviro_scientist_turns_global_warming_skeptic

Returning to an old theme, ideas have consequences, bad ideas have bad consequences, and the U.S. is paying the price for bad ideas right now. Gas prices have gone up 90% on Obama's watch. Some of it is market-driven because China and India have been buying oil in a big way, but much of it is self-inflicted and driven by ideology. We can increase the supply of these readily available resources and when supply increases, prices come down. It's about time we again try what we know works.