The New Age of Fossil Fuels

There's a must-read article at Salon.com called, "Everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong." It's amazing that it even appeared at Salon. An argument strongly in favor of fossil fuels that debunks various environmentalist predictions of doom, at Salon? As I read it I was anticipating the shrieks of outrage that were sure to greet it. Check out the comments for entertainment value. Liberals aren't fond of challenges to their cherished assumptions. Here's a couple excerpts from the article.

If gas hydrates as well as shale gas, tight oil, oil sands and other unconventional sources can be tapped at reasonable cost, then the global energy picture looks radically different than it did only a few years ago. Suddenly it appears that there may be enough accessible hydrocarbons to power industrial civilization for centuries, if not millennia, to come. ... The abundance and geographic diversity of fossil fuels made possible by technology in time will reduce the dependence of the U.S. on particular foreign energy exporters, eliminating the national security argument for renewable energy. And if the worst-case scenarios for climate change were plausible, then the most effective way to avert catastrophic global warming would be the rapid expansion of nuclear power, not over-complicated schemes worthy of Rube Goldberg or Wile E. Coyote to carpet the world’s deserts and prairies with solar panels and wind farms that would provide only intermittent energy from weak and diffuse sources.

The whole article is definitely worth reading.

We Need Proven Sources of Energy

There's a good article at The Western Experience called, "The Reality Is, We Need Oil." While the title is true, I'd expand it to say that we need more energy production in general, from proven sources that actually work on a large scale. Along with more domestic oil, we need more nuclear power, more natural gas, and more refineries turning oil into gasoline. However, we aren't going to get any of those things with Democrats in charge.

Democrats continuously marginalize America’s potential for domestic energy production. Their law makers, with the help of Obama’s pen and rhetoric, have declared war on energy. They chose to tax “Big Oil”, limit oil production and exploration, revoke leases for inland production and rendering it financially backbreaking for businesses to drill on federally owned land. Democrats decry record profits made by the oil industries as evil and mislead the country to believe they are only leveling the playing field between consumer and producer. In actuality, the Earth-Democrats are engineering a sinister plan for blowback. A person who possesses even an elementary understanding of macroeconomics would know these added costs will simply be passed on to the consumer.

Unfortunately the Democratic Party has aligned itself with environmentalists who oppose most energy production. What we get from Democrats are pie in the sky schemes and wasted money on unproven alternative energy sources. When it comes to the sources that actually produce our energy, we get crippling regulation, taxation, and bureaucratic hindrances that drive up the costs and restrict new construction and exploration. Energy policy is just one of the many reasons to vote Republican.