If, that is, John McCain can be persuaded to see the light, come to his senses, and make a prime time speech in which he apologizes for being wrong about global warming and climate change, has learned that CO2 is not the enemy, that humans have no identifiable effect on climate, which has always been changing, and humans cannot stop it; and that it is far more important to produce enough energy from all sources, nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind, oil, and coal, than to go tilting at the windmills of Greenism to stop the unstoppable climate change, which is entirely natural and organic.

If John McCain can learn that lesson, he can turn the issue of global warming and climate change on its head, and use it to take down his opponent and the Greens and Greenism in the next four months. But it must be done as a frontal attack, a headlong cavalry charge straight up the hill into the face of the enemy; something neither his opponent nor the Greens are prepared for. It would throw them into total panic and disarray.

Last week oil prices spiked $10.75 in one day, a new record, closing Friday at $138.54. Unemployment rose 10% in one month, May, from 5% to 5.5%. The Dow dropped 394 points, the biggest drop in over a year. The average working stiff has seen his cost to commute to work and home again double in less than two years, even as the equity in his house plummeted. And airlines are cutting hundreds of flights, and thousands of jobs. The high cost of not drilling for oil in America is going to savage the economy at every level.

Cybercast News Service (CNS News), in a June 6th article entitled "Lawmakers Split on Drilling for Vast Amounts of Oil in USA," reports that the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management estimates there are 139 billion barrels of untapped, recoverable oil onshore and offshore in the United States. This does not include the vast Bakken oil fields of Montana and the Dakotas, or the enormous shale oil deposits in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, or the oil sands of Oklahoma. CNS interviewed four members of Congress and found the Republicans supporting Jed Babbin's call to "drill here, drill now," while Democrats were opposed.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said, "You've got that right. We can't get it (the oil) because the environmental elitists are preventing that with moratoria saying it would take ten years to get it developed. "Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) also said Congress should deregulate to allow more drilling. "My sense is that the most direct route is for Congress to take direct action and give the American people more access to American oil."

Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) replied, "No," adding that he would "never say never," but that circumstances would have to be "pretty drastic" for him to agree to more drilling. "I am more concerned about global warming and the impact of fossil fuel," he said. House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) told CNS he needs to study the issue more. "I haven't studied enough to make that decision," he said.

But a lot of middle class, working class, and fixed-income Americans have studied the issue quite enough, and they're beginning to get angry, visibly angry, at the inexcusable inaction of Congress. As gas prices continue to rise through the summer, the anger will swell into fury. "Earth to Mike Honda," they'll be saying soon, "For us, your constituents, five dollar gasoline is pretty drastic. Earth to Charlie Rangel, how many years do you have to study to learn what you can learn in a day? If it takes that long, Charlie, are you sure you're smart enough to be a member of Congress?"

Wasn't it Mark Twain who once quipped, "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress - but I repeat myself."

Presently, we import 5.4 million barrels of oil a day from OPEC countries. At $138 a barrel, that's $745 million dollars a day we're "exporting" to Saudi Arabia and its neighbors. At 40 jobs per million dollars (at $50,000 a year per job) that's 29,800 jobs for Americans we are "outsourcing" to OPEC each day, rather than investing that money in American oil production and American jobs. At 29,800 jobs a day, that's 10,877,000 American jobs we are exporting to OPEC each year, and if the price of oil rises, so will the job loss. Democrats have threatened to punish corporations that outsource jobs to other countries, but the Democrats' own misbegotten Green policies are the No. 1cause of outsourcing in America.

At some point, something has to give, and it will either be the U.S. economy or Greenism, the obsessive-compulsive Environmentalist Personality Disorder that will sacrifice the jobs, fortunes, futures, and lives, of three hundred million Americans, in slavish homage to the myth that burning "fossil fuels" is causing climate change, and that by reducing our "carbon footprint" we can end climate change. Nothing is further from the truth. The climate has been changing as long as there has been a climate, long before we could have had anything to do with it.

How we ended up with a majority in Congress, and two presidential candidates, who are so appallingly ignorant of the basics of climatology, climate history, and the ubiquity of climate change, after this debate has already been raging for years, is a complete mystery to me. It is, in my opinion, Congressional malpractice: the willful or negligent failure of most members of Congress to become well informed about the real science and history of climate change and what the effect, if any, of CO2 on the global climate really is, or isn't, before making legislative decisions that profoundly affect the lives of 300 million Americans. And I wonder: can we sue Congress, for Congressional Malpractice?

Can we sue Congress for acting on false assumptions, when, by the exercise of reasonable care and due diligence, they could, and should, have become fully and honestly informed on the global warming and climate change issues, before making bad decisions that adversely affect the U.S. economy and the lives of every one of their constituents? Don't they have that duty? And haven't they breached it? And aren't we paying for it?

There is only one way to rescue America from the rising cost of energy that threatens to overwhelm the U.S. economy. And that is to produce more energy. As soon as possible. In America.

We don't have time to wait for pie-in-the-sky fantasies, such as cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass. A little arithmetic tells us that to replace oil with switchgrass, which according to National Geographic can produce "up to" 1,000 gallons of ethanol per acre, per year, we'd have to produce a billion gallons a day, to replace the gasoline and diesel we consume. That's 365 billion gallons a year, plus another 15% to provide the energy to produce all that cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass, for a total of 420 billion gallons a year. This would require 420 cellulosic ethanol plants producing a billion gallons a year, each, and so far, we don't have one. Not one producer of cellulosic ethanol on a commercial scale. And it would require 420 million acres of switchgrass farms, which would be a 150% increase in American farmland. And would not the adverse environmental impact of converting 420 million acres of wildlife habitat to switchgrass farms be enormous? Where are the Greens now? Why isn't the Sierra Club demanding an Environmental Impact Report?

Congress needs to come to grips with the fact that there is no credible evidence that CO2 causes "global warming. "It has been warmer in the past, when CO2 was lower than now, and the temperature dropped 0.7 degrees last year, while CO2 was rising.

But CO2 is plant food, fertilizer, plants suck it up and grow, and more CO2 in the air means plants grow faster, and need less water. With a growing world population facing chronic food shortages, we need more CO2 in the air to produce more food, not less.

And this means the misguided, misbegotten, delusional era of Greenism has to end. Soon. Now. The delusions of the radical environmentalists have taken us down this dangerous road, and the chickens are coming home to roost. And the chickens are very expensive. Having quarantined 90% of Federal lands from energy exploration and development, and blocked construction of nuclear power, and fuel refineries, it is the environmentalist policies, the Green policies, the Greenism, of the last generation that has put American in the spot it's in, and America can only get out of the spot by rejecting the delusional Greenism of the past, and embracing a rational energy policy for the future.

I'm with Barack Obama. I want "change"...but maybe not the same change Barack Obama wants.

Here's the change I want:

1. Legislation to immediately lift all moratoria on oil and natural gas exploration and development on Federal lands, except National Parks.

2. Legislation to grant a 100% tax credit for all new capital investment in energy production in the U.S. and its territorial waters. If you spent $20,000 to put solar panels on your roof, you get a $20,000 tax credit. If Exxon puts $75 billion into developing new oil production in the U.S., Exxon gets a $75 billion tax credit. This would "send a message" to OPEC that the party's just about over, and it would create millions of new jobs for working class Americans in America.

3. Legislation to fast-track NRC-approved nuclear power plant designs, and to require Green plaintiffs suing to block the construction of nuclear power plants, geothermal plants, oil refineries, or any other energy project, to prove by "clear and convincing evidence" that the proposed project was unreasonably dangerous, or that the harm it would cause was greater than the benefit it would confer.

Barack Obama said recently that he will deliver "$150 billion over the next ten years" to develop alternative energy.

That's way too little, way too late. America needs it now, not ten years from now. We don't need to pass it through the government skim machine.

And Barry Boy is clueless. By granting a 100% tax credit for new capital investment in energy in the United States, we unleash the magnificent ingenuity of the American people, who will pump $150 billion into energy development in one year, not ten, and produce ten times, or a hundred times, as much new energy in ten years as any government-managed program ever could.

That's change.

And that's the end of Greenism.

Raymond Kraft

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.325/pub_detail.asp

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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Response from James Taylor:

I find no fault with your article except to say, but their is more! There are 75,000 dams in the US, 8,000 are 50 feet or more in height, but only 850 of them produce 5mw or more. The Greens will not let us expand our hydro-electric resources even though there is no carbon released. Cheap and abundant electrical energy could end the use of oil for heating which should be a win/win solution. This makes their real goal a little clearer. They are trying to force America to reduce all energy use, renewable or not.

Al Gore stated in 92', that the internal combustion engine needs to be phased out over the next 25 years. He and his liberal following are using global warming as an excuse to restructure our nation, and allow us to be dominated by the rest of the world. Open borders with non-citizens allowed to do as they please while Americans are limited to only so much carbon use each year. If you drive or fly too much, or kept your home too warm in the winter, you would pay a fine and lose your vehicle.

I have also read about some Greens even filing lawsuits against wind and solar farms.
Thanks for all the good work you are doing, James

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the fraud that has made Al Gore a centimillionaire. If we look at the real climate data, the long term temperature trends show us that the climate is 0.4 degrees warmer than 1,000 years ago, and 3 degrees cooler than 8,000 years ago (http://www.globalwarmingart.com/). The Hadley Center for Climate Prediction charts the global temperature falling 0.4 degrees from 1988 to 1992, then rising 0.8 degrees from 1992 to peak in1998, then falling 0.7 degrees by January 2008.

The climate has been changing as long as there has been a climate. It's not our fault, and we can't stop it.

But I digress.

Currently, the U.S. imports roughly 25% of its oil, 5.4 million barrels a day, from OPEC, mostly from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria. At $130 a barrel, we are exporting over $700 million dollars a day to OPEC. $1.4 billion every two days. $256 billion a year. That's more than one-third of the US trade deficit of $720 billion. And that's why the value of the US dollar is falling. Not the only reason, but a big reason.

For 20 years, environmentalists, Democrats, and a few misguided Republicans have been busy keeping ‘Big Oil’ out of ANWR and out of the oil fields on the Coastal Shelves, where there are an estimated 635 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to heat 60 million American homes for a century, and 115 billion barrels of oil, enough to replace 100% of the oil we now buy from OPEC for 21 years. At $130 a barrel, that would cut out trade deficit by $5.4 trillion over 21 years.

Yes, $5.4 trillion, which is enough to pay the entire federal budget for nearly two years.

Critics say that opening up 2,000 acres of the 19,049,236 acre Alaska National Wildlife Refuge for oil production would do little to bring down the price of gas and that may be so. But it would add jobs by the millions, to the U.S. economy. With an estimated 10 billion barrels, ANWR could produce 1 million barrels a day for 30 years. At $130 a barrel, that's $130 million a day. That's $47 billion a year.

A million dollars creates 40 jobs at an average pay of $50,000 a year. $130 million creates 5,200 jobs at $50,000 a year.$47 billion creates 1,880,000 new jobs for American workers at $50,000 a year. At current oil prices, by keeping ANWR off limits, Democrats reduce employment for the middle-class, working-class Americans they pretend to care about by 1,880,000 jobs. And that's enough jobs to cut the unemployment rate from 5% to 4%.

But what if we open up the Coastal Shelves for oil production, too? And produce 5.4 million barrels a day, to replace all the oil we buy from OPEC?

That would re-invest the $256 billion a year we now deport to OPEC back into the U.S. economy. And that would fund 10,152,000 new jobs for working-class Americans, jobs that pay an average of $50,000 a year. And that's enough new jobs to reduce the unemployment rate, in theory, from 5% to 0%. Zero. And that is the high cost of keeping ANWR "pristine." We can lay the blame for 100% of America's unemployment at the feet of the Democrats, liberal Republicans and environmentalists who keep ANWR and the coastal oil reserves off limits. (Thank you Senator John McCain. – emphasis added)

Put another way, every year that we continue buying 5.4 million barrels of oil a day from OPEC, we "outsource" more than ten million American jobs to OPEC. If politicians really cared about working-class Americans, they would be rushing to open up ANWR and other oil and gas reserves on federal lands as quickly as possible to create ten million new jobs, revalue the falling dollar, stimulate the economy, and write a declaration of independence from OPEC.

But, they don't.

By Raymond Kraft
June 5, 2008

http://www.aim.org/guest-column/10-million-jobs-the-high-cost-of-saving-anwr/

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A portion is extracted from businesses of all shapes and sizes in the form of a corporate income tax. Individual income taxes provide five times the amount of corporate taxes. Employment taxes contribute another portion, roughly two thirds of the individual income taxes. Add to that gift, estate and excise taxes. In 2003, tax revenues were somewhere close to $2 trillion. For FY2007, beginning October 1st, 2006, Congress authorized a $2.8 trillion budget, an increase by 40% since President Bush first took office in 2001. President Clinton’s last budget was $1.8 trillion.

We give the President credit for the budget because he signed it into law. However, never forget for a minute that it was Congressmen, our Senators and district Representative, who inserted the spending provisions into the budget and it was Congress that passed it.

What effect is this spending having on the national economy? We are told almost daily there is no demand-driven inflation. Demand is determined by the magnitude of public consumption expenditures and government consumption expenditures, plus investment expenditures and net exports/imports. You know that both public and government consumption expenditures (spending) have been huge. Over the last two years alone, $1.352 trillion of equity has been extracted from real estate - an amount equal to about 10% of annual GDP - and spent without saving hardly a dime. During the same period, net imports/exports has been hugely negative. One only needs to look at product labels in any retail establishment to know that most of what we purchase today was manufactured in foreign countries. Price inflation from government and public consumption expenditures demand is running wild and unchecked, and in several asset classes as a result of speculation, inflation has become “pure.”

Congress could just as easily have shown a pretense of fiscal responsibility and reduced this year’s budget instead of raising it. While Congressmen and the media are quick to tell us the President’s words are all sound – all sound, it is Congress that is blindly proceeding to do just exactly what it wants to do, spending what it collectively wants to spend. It is Congress, aided and abetted by the media, that blames this President (and past presidents) for Congress’ ill-advised decisions on everything from the war in Iraq to entitlement spending and earmarks. Even votes are becoming expensive to purchase. Ask any Congressman.

When anyone overspends their income, they must go into debt if they continue to make purchases, which we know to as “deficit spending.” When tax revenues are inadequate to pay the bills, additional revenue has to come from somewhere. This additonal revenue iis obtained from the sale of United States assets, in the form of government debt instruments (Treasury securities). Treasury securities are issued by the United States Department of the Treasury through the Bureau of the Public Debt – notice in the name the words ‘Public Debt.' Debt financing instruments are referred to simply as "Treasuries." Foreign governments and banks purchase our Treasuries with U.S. dollars which they acquired from selling us consumer goods or petroleum products.

There are four types of Treasury securities: Treasury bills, Treasury notes, Treasury bonds, and Savings bonds. Treasury securities (except savings bonds) are very liquid forms of national debt and heavily traded by international entities on the secondary market.

A national debt is created when a lending foreign government or bank (such as the Federal Reserve) agrees to loan a sum of assets (U.S. dollars) to a debtor nation, in this case the United States. As you would expect, these loans are made with an expectation of repayment, plus interest. The choices are few – repay, reschedule or default. Historically, individual debt was always responsible for the creation of indentured servants. Remember this detail, because national debt is no different, only on a larger scale. National debt is definitely not charity. Charity is best exemplified by the United States’ internal income redistribution programs (entitlement programs) which are a give-away of tax dollars with no expectation of receiving anything in return, not even nationalism. Entitlement programs are a subsidy by Congress of ethically, morally, educationally and culturally challenged Americans and illegal aliens in return for Congressional self interest, votes and power. Any organization or special interest group granted a tax exempt status – whether religious, political or charitable - for any reason - is similarly enjoying a pernicious form of entitlement program – receiving citizenship benefits paid for by other taxpayers including protection of the law, but indignantly contributing nothing – nothing at all.

To anyone who would read this article voluntarily, you probably already know that China has become the world’s biggest foreign exchange holder of U.S. Treasuries. Chinese holdings of United States foreign exchange (debt) reached $853.7 billion as of February 28, 2006. Japanese holdings of U.S. foreign exchange were $852 billion as of March 31, 2006.

For comparison in a global sense, the U.S. current account deficit in 2005 was $791.5 billion. The world’s next largest current account deficit in 2005 was Spain’s $86 billion.

It will take decades for our children and grandchildren to repay our government-incurred national debt, with interest. It is important to emphasize that the national debt is not the responsibility of everyone - only those individuals and corporations who do pay taxes (since the bottom 50% of wage earners and illegal aliens pay no taxes at all).

Red State Patriot

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