These three sources here, here, and here tell the story. In Oregon, a functioning coal plant with 20 years of service life left was shut down and demolished. Excerpts from all three are below:

“There was a lot of work put into it and it didn’t take long to bring it down,” Aldritt said. “It’s kind of sad to see that much infrastructure wasted, because it was still a functioning plant when they shut it down.”

Instead, power companies will rely on renewable sources — which will be good for the environment — but not as dependable. Experts say we will have a one in four chance of blackouts by the year 2026.

The plant shut down in October 2020, and the decommissioning had been planned since 2010, when PGE agreed to shut the plant down 20 years early as part of a settlement in an environmental lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club.

If the government didn’t hate you, the lawsuits would never have been accepted for filing.

Boardman is the first but not the last coal plant to close in the West. Over eight years, 12 plants will shut down, taking down enough dependable electricity to power 3.8 million homes.

But as we [WE] transition away from coal and gas as energy demands increase, PGE customers will also have to do their part by reducing how much they use.

“We” will just have to be cold. “We” will just have to live like the third world.

DEMOLITION VIDEO: Oregon’s last standing coal power plant comes down in a controlled implosion.

This plant, in Boardman, was decommissioned about 2 years ago – symbolic of a shift to more renewable energy sources in Oregon. @KGWNews pic.twitter.com/9RZ9x2BGlE

— Evan Watson (@EvanWatsonNews) September 15, 2022

First, your blessings are being removed by God. The Bible tells you what to do about that, but you’ll be busy all week pretending elections still matter; we doubt this post will even be read. But, your blood is upon your own head; you’ve been warned over these pages.

Second, related to point one, the Republicans won’t and can’t help. The Global Oligarchy runs the permanent bureaucracy. The coal plant was shut down under Donald J. Trump, and for two years of his presidency, Republicans held both chambers of congress and the SCOTUS. Quit wasting time on politics.

Thirdly, you must plan. We don’t know what you’re going to do to keep your family fed and warm, but the days of depending on national infrastructure run by reasonably caring fellow American men are over. What they won’t tell you is that coal saved the trees. Perhaps buy land and fell one large tree every year for wood? Maybe a better plan is for a wood, propane, gasifier, and oil mix? Think multiple sources, antifragile. Prepare your home accordingly. 2030 is seven years away!

Digging up info for this post started with a tip at SurvivalBlog.

Source:

It remains the only proven technology capable of serving the energy needs of de-carbonized modern society.

[…]

The energy demands of an industrialized society require an abundant source of uninterrupted power. However, the “green power” (primarily wind and solar) intended to replace fossil fuels is, by its nature, intermittent and subject to fluctuations in the weather. While that limitation could be eased somewhat with the augmentation of back-up batteries, the land-consumption requirements for a wholesale shift to renewables would be prohibitive.

The author is making the classic Conservative mistake. He’s assuming the Left, and particularly the Global Oligarchs, desire you to have a prosperous and growing future instead of wanting ninety percent of the population dead. His base assumption is wrong. The information in the article is interesting, but the left doesn’t want to debate the facts of what a healthy modern country needs for its energy purposes. The projections of Conservatives will get themselves killed.

Unlike fossil-fuel energy and nuclear power, the energy from solar and wind is widely dispersed, requiring large tracts of land to “collect and harness” it for power generation. Fossil fuels can produce 500 to 10,000 watts per square meter and nuclear can produce 500 to 1,000 watts per square meter. Solar power, on the other hand, can only produce five to 20 watts per square meter. Wind can produce just one or two.

The current installed power from all energy sources in the US is 1.2 terawatts (one million megawatts). Converting all that energy to wind and solar (assuming an average land use requirement of 10 watts per square meter), would require a tract of land larger than the size of Texas and California combined, making the comprehensive transition to green infeasible. So, if fossil fuels are removed from the commercial power mix, then nuclear is the only viable source of power available to meet the energy needs of an industrialized nation.

“Green energy” is often described as “clean energy” because it comes from natural sources (wind, sun, and water) that produce no environmental pollutants or greenhouse gases. But that is only true if analysis of the process is limited to green energy production—that is, the actual conversion of wind, solar, and hydro energy into electricity.

However, when the total life cycle of mining, manufacturing, production, and disposal is considered, green energy is revealed to be anything but “clean.” As an AP investigation recently revealed:

The birds no longer sing, and the herbs no longer grow. The fish no longer swim in rivers that have turned a murky brown … cows are sometimes found dead. … Water is no longer drinkable, and endangered species such as tigers, pangolins and red pandas have fled the area.

That’s not a description of the Flint River region in Michigan, the Fukushima environs in Japan, the Love Canal community in upstate New York, nor of the dystopian wasteland in an apocalyptic novel. It’s the condition of northern Myanmar on China’s south-west border—the result of the unrestrained mining of rare earth minerals. These materials are essential to the manufacture of green energy products like electric vehicles and wind turbines.

Years of unregulated mining have turned whole regions in Myanmar and other parts of the undeveloped world into “sacrifice zones”—areas where the health and welfare of local residents are sacrificed for the “greater good,” which, in this instance, is global de-carbonization. As the push for green energy continues, the demand for these minerals will keep pace, along with environmental hazards not limited to mining.

Irrespective of the energy source, the machinery (e.g., batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, dams) needed to convert it into useable power are manufactured from materials that must be not only mined, but also processed and ultimately disposed of. According to a 2020 paper produced by the Manhattan Institute, “compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.” For example:

A single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car ‘consumes’ five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.

Eventually, all that material becomes waste requiring disposal:

By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.

Of course, a 10-fold increase in green energy materials will require a commensurate increase in the fossil fuels (primarily, diesel) needed for their extraction, processing, and disposal by excavators, trucks, and other heavy equipment. In other words, green energy is anything but “carbon-neutral.”

He goes on to discuss how China owns the global rare earth minerals market. As long as 20 years ago, folks were alarmed at the investments China was making in Australia, Africa, and South and Central America. Those investments are paying off monetarily and strategically for China. America hasn’t invested in minerals and mineral rights in decades, and now we’re dependent on foreign powers for just about everything from raw materials to production and especially manufacturing. We’ll lose the R&D edge shortly.

Source:

Well, well… here is a nice little report from The Financial Times on the economics of global oil production and pricing:

Saudi Arabia has offered its main customers in the US, Europe and Asia extra oil supplies through the end of the year, a sign the world’s largest exporter is worried about the impact of rising prices on the global economy.

The Group of Seven finance ministers last month called on oil exporters to expand production. Saudi Arabia initially reacted coolly to the request, saying that global supply and demand were balanced. But the kingdom has recently taken steps to bring down prices, consulting with large refiners and offering them extra oil.

“The current price is too high,” a senior Gulf-based oil official told the Financial Times. “We would like to see oil prices back to $100 a barrel.”

The price of Brent, the global oil benchmark, has risen 33 per cent from mid-June to a peak of $117.95 a barrel on Friday. On Monday it plunged almost $4 in just four minutes, but later recovered.

Saudi Arabia last launched a similar round of consultations with major oil refiners in March, weeks before it boosted its production to a 30-year high of 10m barrels a day. Riyadh is now evaluating the response from refiners.

The nation last month produced 9.9m b/d, but the senior official said that Riyadh was now again pumping around 10m b/d. “We are consulting our clients about their oil needs and telling them we are ready to supply more,” the senior official said.

Opec delegates said Riyadh was trying to bring prices down. “The Saudis are actively managing the market,” added another senior oil official from an African Opec nation. “They supplied a little less when prices dropped to $90 over the summer and they will supply more now that prices are above $115.”

The signal from Riyadh comes as rising energy prices emerge as a contentious political issue in the US presidential race. Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, has accused President Barack Obama of not doing enough to bring gasoline prices down.

The cost of regular gasoline surged in the US last week to $3.878 per gallon, the highest level ever for this period of the year. US retail gasoline prices reached an all-time high of $4.114 per gallon in early July 2008.

The White House last month dusted off plans to use the strategic petroleum reserve to bring prices down. But so far Mr Obama has not authorised a release, in part because opposition from allies such as Germany and, to a lesser extent, Italy, Japan and South Korea.

Hmmmm….I seem to remember that El Presidente said something to the effect that higher production of oil will not affect gas prices.  Oh yes, here are his remarks from March 2012:

The recent spike in gas prices has been another painful reminder of why we have to invest in this technology.   As usual, politicians have been rolling out their three-point plans for two-dollar gas: drill, drill, and drill some more.  Well, my response is, we have been drilling.  Under my Administration, oil production in America is at an eight-year high.  We’ve quadrupled the number of operating oil rigs, and opened up millions of acres for drilling.

But you and I both know that with only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices – not when consume 20 percent of the world’s oil. We need an all-of-the-above strategy that relies less on foreign oil and more on American-made energy – solar, wind, natural gas, biofuels, and more.

That’s right.  We “can’t drill our way to lower gas prices…”   Because, El Presidente says, the United States only has “2% of the world’s oil reserves.”   But we all know this is an outdated deception aimed at the gullible.  In fact, the Congressional Research Service reported several years ago that the U.S. has more oil and gas reserves (as that term is generally understood in the world oil industry) than any, other country on earth.   In fact, the U.S. has more oil and gas than Saudia Arabia, Venezuela and Candada combined.

According to this Investor’s Business Daily report based on a Congressional testimony by the Government Accounting Office:

Energy: The Government Accountability Office tells Congress the Green River Formation out West contains an “amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.” So why are we keeping it locked up on federal lands?

Exploding the Big Lie pushed by President Obama that we can’t drill our way out of high gas prices because we have but 2% of the world’s proven oil reserves, Anu Mittal, GAO director of natural resources and environment, testified before Congress last week that just one small part of the U.S. is capable of outproducing the rest of the planet.

That small part is known as the Green River Formation, the world’s largest oil shale deposit, and is located in a largely vacant region of mostly federal land on the western edge of the Rocky Mountains that includes portions of Wyoming, Utah and Colorado.

As we have written in our “Oil And Gas/Fact And Fiction” series, the Green River Formation has been dubbed our Persia on the Plains, an area with technically recoverable oil in an amount estimated at four times the proven resources of Saudi Arabia.

Given that current U.S. daily oil consumption is running at 19.5 million barrels, the staggering amount of Green River reserves would by itself supply domestic oil consumption for more than 200 years. That sure blows the heck out of the “peak oil” theory that the world is running out of oil.

According to Mittal’s testimony before the House science subcommittee on energy and the environment, the U.S. Geological Survey “estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions.”

According to the president’s bizarre formulation, this oil does not count as a “proven” reserve because little drilling has been done. There is a reason for that. As Mittal testified: “The federal government is in a unique position to influence the development of oil shale because 72% of the oil shale within the Green River Formation lies beneath federal lands managed by BLM (Bureau of Land Management).”

(Emphasis Added)

In any event, Obama does not believe what he says, as usual.   While he pontificates about not being able to “drill our way out” of our energy problems, the Financial Times article reports that he has “dusted off plans to use the strategic petroleum reserve to bring prices down.”   If more drilling won’t solve the problem of high prices, then tapping the strategic reserve is useless.  Just one more example of El Presidente’s contempt for the American people.

Furthermore, even if it was true that the U.S. has “only” 2% of the world’s oil reserves, pricing is not determined by how much oil is in the ground.   Pricing is determined by how much is pumped out of the ground.   According to the CIA world fact book, as of 2010, the U.S. was producing an average of 9.688 million barrels of oil per day.   This already exceeds the production of Saudi Arabia when it wants to maintain stable pricing.    As the Financial Times article shows, however, when Saudi Arabia wants to bring down the price of oil, it ramps up its production to something around 10 million barrels per day.   If Saudi Arabia can affect world oil prices by simply putting an extra million or so barrels of oil per day onto the oil market, it is axiomatic that the U.S. can similarly affect the price of oil by getting production to over 10 million barrels or more per day.  In fact, some experts have said that the U.S. has the resources and capability to be producing over 15 million barrels of oil per day if we so choose.

One, other aspect of this subject that needs to be touched upon is the effect of Ben Bernanke’s federal monetary policy on oil prices.  Since Bernanke has decided to unleash another round of printing money and since oil prices are denominated in U.S. dollars, we will see the price of oil rise concomitant with the increase in the U.S. money supply.   In effect, then, the Saudis are underwriting our money printing by increasing oil production to offset to some degree the rise of oil prices that will naturally ensue because of the rising volume of dollars.

Take this one step further:  if the U.S. wants to recover from the Federal Reserve’s monetary inflation policy, producing increasing amounts of domestic oil is one effective way to do it.   Oil is real wealth.  Just like gold is real wealth (or, for that matter, all those incredibly valuable rare earth minerals the U.S. is sitting on but cannot develop due to ridiculous bureaucratic obstacles).  When the U.S. produces lots of oil, the wealth of the world comes to the U.S. rather than flowing to Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or Russia.   Oil, in a sense, is perhaps our greatest strategic weapon because it is one resource that the world cannot do without and it changes the balance of power globally.    In a crude sense, he who has the most oil wins.  We have it.  It’s time to start using it.

It’s time to renew that popular phrase:  Drill Baby, Drill.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Isn’t this just swell?  According to this article in Technology Review, there are two, new approaches being tested for making coal-burning power plants cleaner and more efficient:

A pair of new technologies could reduce the cost of capturing carbon dioxide from coal plants and help utilities comply with existing and proposed environmental regulations, including requirements to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Both involve burning coal in the presence of pure oxygen rather than air, which is mostly nitrogen. Major companies including Toshiba, Shaw, and Itea have announced plans to build demonstration plants for the technologies in coming months.

The basic idea of burning fossil fuels in pure oxygen isn’t new. The drawback is that it’s more expensive than conventional coal plant technology, because it requires additional equipment to separate oxygen and nitrogen. The new technologies attempt to offset at least some of this cost by improving efficiency and reducing capital costs in other areas of a coal plant. Among other things, they simplify the after-treatment required to meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations.

The article doesn’t state how much money is being sent down the rat hole to develop these new technologies, but, regardless of the amount involved, this is such a colossal waste that I don’t know whether to laugh or punch the fake rhino head on the wall.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is still on a holy crusade against “global warming” by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, despite the fact that the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory has been repeatedly exposed as a sham.   As a result, precious time, money, talent and resources are being directed towards solving a “problem” that doesn’t exist.

The Left wants to talk about stimulating the economy, but what about the stimulative effect of lowering the cost of electricity to businesses and consumers?  Imagine the effect of simply eliminating the EPA’s carbon dioxide emission standards on the generation of electricity?  This is the sort of thing that should be high on Romney’s to-do list in January 2013.

These days we take our optimism wherever we can get it, and if a Leftist media outlet like Bloomberg is sounding a positive note about surging energy production in the U.S., the real news is likely even better than reported.

A few, choice excerpts:

The U.S. is the closest it has been in almost 20 years to achieving energy self-sufficiency, a goal the nation has been pursuing since the 1973 Arab oil embargo triggered a recession and led to lines at gasoline stations.

Domestic oil output is the highest in eight years. The U.S. is producing so much natural gas that, where the government warned four years ago of a critical need to boost imports, it now may approve an export terminal. Methanex Corp., the world’s biggest methanol maker, said it will dismantle a factory in Chile and reassemble it in Louisiana to take advantage of low natural gas prices. And higher mileage standards and federally mandated ethanol use, along with slow economic growth, have curbed demand.

The result: The U.S. has reversed a two-decade-long decline in energy independence, increasing the proportion of demand met from domestic sources over the last six years to an estimated 81 percent through the first 10 months of 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the U.S. Department of Energy. That would be the highest level since 1992.

Of course, Bloomberg finds it necessary to throw in the canards about the dangers of “fracking” and the lamentation that greater hydrocarbon usage will further depress the interest in and practicability of solar and wind energy.  Against this persistent Leftist meme, however, it should be noted that the article does not mention global warming, nor quote any “leading scientists” about the dangers of increased carbon production, nor feature a picture of polar bears precariously perched on a tiny bit of ice.   That, my friends, is a sure sign of progress in the fight to restore American intellectual sense.

There is so much good news in this sector of the economy in fact that Bloomberg’s attempts to dampen enthusiasm seem to be more a product of the authors’ embarrassment than any, actual cloud on the horizon.   Read the whole thing and do a little, guilt-free basking.

A few notes on this.

First, there is no doubt that the Obama Administration is going to try to take credit for this boom in energy production.   The President, in fact, attempted to do just that in his State of the Union address to Congress.   No one should be fooled, however.   The Administration has dragged its feet and done all it can to suppress, depress, and discourage hydrocarbon production since it took office, including banning off-shore drilling in places like Virginia which has been ready to start since 2009 and nixing the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas.

Second, as good as this news is for the U.S. economy and geopolitical position in the world, it could and should be much, much better.   Gas and oil production would dwarf the current figures if the Federal government was not putting massive roadblocks in the way of energy production in this country.  This surge in production is almost exclusively a function of private enterprise finding ways around government hostility and getting the job done.   It is a classic example of the American spirit of independent action overcoming daunting opposition.   Just consider the news from the article as it relates to the amazing work being done in North Dakota:

Crude production in the U.S. is already increasing. Within three years, domestic output could reach 7 million barrels a day, the highest in 20 years, said Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates in Houston, a consulting firm. The U.S. produced 5.9 million barrels of crude oil a day in December, while consuming 18.5 million barrels of petroleum products, according to the Energy Department.

North Dakota — the center of the so-called tight-oil transformation — is now the fourth largest oil-producing state, behind Texas, Alaska and California.

The growth in oil and gas output means the U.S. will overtake Russia as the world’s largest energy producer in the next eight years, said Jamie Webster, senior manager for the markets and country strategy group at PFC Energy, a Washington- based consultant.

While U.S. consumers would still be susceptible to surges in global oil prices, “we’d end up sending some of that cash to North Dakota” rather than to Saudi Arabia, said Richard Schmalensee, a professor of economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

What the article does not tell you is that all of this production in North Dakota is occurring on private lands.  The Federal government owns massive tracts of land throughout the Western U.S. and has put virtually all of it off-limits to energy production.   The estimated hydrocarbon resources of Colorado alone rival those of Saudi Arabia.   Imagine for one moment what kind of production the U.S. is capable of when even a part of those Federal lands are opened up for development.   In this sense, the Bloomberg article is actually disguising the enormous potential of U.S. production.   The U.S. has the potential to put OPEC out of business, single-handedly.

Finally, in another delicious moment of vindication that should be enjoyed thoroughly, the avalanche of optimism over U.S. energy production conclusively puts the lie to years of Leftist Democrat drivel that the U.S. cannot “drill its way out of our energy problems.”  Here is El Presidente in May, 2011 in his energy policy speech in Indiana:

President Obama called for the elimination of billions of dollars in oil industry tax breaks Friday, while stressing that the United States can’t drill its way out of high gas prices.

“We can’t just drill our way out of the problem,” Obama said during an energy policy speech in Indiana Friday. “If we’re serious about addressing our energy problems, we’re going to have to do more than drill.”

Obama’s remarks come as Washington policymakers are feeling pressure to take action to address high gas prices, which are nearing a nationwide average of $4 a gallon.Republicans have ramped up calls for expanded domestic oil-and-gas production. House Republicans passed the first of three offshore drilling bills Thursday that have been fast-tracked by GOP leadership.

But Democrats, for their part, are pushing for the repeal of billion of dollars in oil industry tax breaks, citing record oil industry profits and soaring pump prices.

*****

He noted that it’s important to “encourage safe and responsible oil production here at home,” but called for a wide-ranging energy policy strategy focused on reducing the country’s oil imports by one-third by 2025, ramping up vehicle fuel economy standards and relying on low-emission electricity sources.

Remember this when gas prices again head to $4 per gallon and more this Summer.    We will again hear the Republicans in Congress pushing for greater drilling rights and we will hear this same response from El Presidente and his accomplices on Capitol Hill, “No, we can’t drill our way out of high gas prices.”

Pardon the thick irony here, but, as the Bloomberg article and many others like it demonstrate: YES, WE CAN.

How bad have things gotten for President Obama?

So bad that even the slavish State Run Media are beginning to point out the obvious fibs and flaws in  Obama’s September 8th speech to Congress.

The Associated Press notes here at least four instances of fibbing by Obama in the speech.  The lede paragraph alone is something that we would not have seen even 10 months ago:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s promise Thursday that everything in his jobs plan will be paid for rests on highly iffy propositions.

It will only be paid for if a committee he can’t control does his bidding, if Congress puts that into law and if leaders in the future – the ones who will feel the fiscal pinch of his proposals – don’t roll it back.

The AP article points out that Obama’s claim that his new calls for stimulus spending will be fully paid for is unlikely at best given the reliance on a future Congress and president to come up with the money and/or cuts.   Obama’s assertion that his proposals have all been supported by Republicans at one time or another is also a distortion that does not take into account the changed circumstances of the economy and the federal deficits, nor Republican opposition to these very proposals.   The AP correctly notes that Obama’s claim that the new stimulus measures “will not add to the deficit” is patently untrue: since federal revenues are completely absorbed by defense and entitlement spending, any additional spending on stimulus can only come from borrowed (i.e. deficit) funds.  Finally, the AP calls out Obama on his claim that the new stimulus will create immediate employment as several of the proposals, such as the “infrastructure bank,” will take months if not years to set up.

In addition, as we saw with Stimulus I, even Obama admitted that there were no “shovel ready jobs” as he expected.  Repairs of roads, bridges, highway projects all take time to plan and implement and, given the contraction in the construction industry over the last, few years, it is quite possible that any infrastructure jobs that are ready to implement now will be given to the few, remaining companies that have managed to stay alive.   And we can never discount the crony factor when huge amounts of federal dollars are being doled out.   Much of that money will wind up in the pockets of political supporters rather than creating any new jobs.

But the Associated Press is not alone.

The New York Times and CNBC are pointing out the inherent weakness in Obama’s plan to jump start the economy.   CNBC reprints an article from the NYT printed September 10, 2011 titled, “Employers Say Jobs Plan Won’t Lead to Hiring Spur.”

The dismal state of the economy is the main reason many companies are reluctant to hire workers, and few executives are saying that President Obama’s jobs plan — while welcomed — will change their minds any time soon.

That sentiment was echoed across numerous industries by executives in companies big and small on Friday, underscoring the challenge for the Obama administration as it tries to encourage hiring and perk up the moribund economy.

The plan failed to generate any optimism on Wall Street as the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average each fell about 2.7 percent.

As President Obama faced an uphill battle in Congress to win support even for portions of the plan, many employers dismissed the notion that any particular tax break or incentive would be persuasive. Instead, they said they tended to hire more workers or expand when the economy improved.

This is such a fundamental concept of business that it amazes me that a president of the United States could not grasp it.  As a small business owner myself, I can attest to the fact that no amount of payroll tax breaks or tax credits would induce me to hire an employee that I do not need.  In a business that is functioning normally — i.e., not skewed by cronyism, subsidies or other factors that distort profit-loss considerations– hiring is driven by demand for products or services that cannot be met with current staffing.  A tax break or credit, particularly one that is temporary, is not a reason to hire.

So this is the tectonic divide between the Obamas of the world and The Rest of Us.   In Obama’s unshakeable faith in the Keynesian Religion, the only answer, always and forever, is stimulus.   He simply cannot see that the biggest obstacle to hiring is the very government action to which he is irrevocably committed. For The Rest of Us, a government that is imposing a huge, yet-to-be understood healthcare mandate, spending us and the next 3 generations into debt oblivion, corrupting the natural order of free markets in competition for customers and innovation, and going out of its way to demonize the “rich,” punish them and redistribute wealth to the unproductive class of society is ample reason to hunker down, save up your cash (or convert to hard assets), hire no one you will have to be regulated for, and wait out the storm of insanity that is Washington, D.C. right now.

Allow me to suggest two actions the government could take that could produce dramatic effects on the economy:  repealing Obamacare (or at least waiving its effects for all 50 states as suggested by Romney), and lifting most of the federal restrictions and bans on domestic energy production.   On this second point, the economic impact of oil and gas production (to say nothing of coal and nuclear) is astounding: both Texas and North Dakota (North Dakota!) have seen huge increases in employment due to a booming oil and gas industry exploiting both old wells and new ones with the process of hydraulic fracturing.

And to show that this boom is not limited to what we think of as the typical oil and gas states like Texas, there is this article from The Dayton Daily News that sketches the outlines of just how vast the natural gas reserves in Ohio might be:

DAYTON — Ohio appears on the cusp of a 21st-century oil and gas boom that could net tens of thousands of new jobs and perhaps build a foundation for new industry, proponents say. The source is natural gas-rich shale rock beneath three-quarters of the state.

***

The Utica Shale, which geologists say has yet to be fully analyzed, extends westward across three-quarters of the state from Ohio’s eastern border, state estimates show. It also lies under New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

It could extend to Montgomery County, but drilling potential remains unknown. Chesapeake said it will increase drilling rigs in the Utica to 20 by the end of 2012 and 40 by 2014.

This year, the state opened up parks and other public land to drilling over opposition from environmentalists.

It might seem a stretch that Ohio could profit from a boom based on oil and gas, an industry with roots here that date to the 19th century. But a new boom appears possible if Pennsylvania’s recent experience with new drilling in another formation, the Marcellus Shale, is any guide. The Marcellus has a smaller footprint in Ohio than the Utica and lies beneath Ohio’s easternmost counties.

Pennsylvania is weathering an iffy economy well, with an unemployment rate of 7.8 percent. Its share of the Marcellus is helping. The Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry issued its estimate this month that natural-gas and crude oil extraction and related industries created 72,000 new hires from the fourth quarter of 2009 to the first quarter of 2011.

It’s too tricky to attribute all the hires to new drilling, said Tim McElhinny, an analyst with the department. But there are so many new hires that a portion must be due to the Marcellus. Those jobs include well drilling, engineering, trucking, highway and bridge building, testing, metal fabrication and new government hires.

The jump in employment in the core gas industries — extraction, drilling and pipeline work — is smaller but nevertheless doubled to 18,837 from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2010.

For the immediate future, it looks like the eastern third of Ohio and the Marcellus Shale is where the action will occur. But longer term, besides offering job opportunities to out-of-work or underemployed residents, low-cost natural gas from the Utica could fuel industrial redevelopment in Ohio, propoponents say.

The U.S. Geological Survey in August updated its estimates for the Marcellus Shale region underlying New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, saying it contains 84 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, recoverable natural gas, vastly more than thought nearly a decade ago in large part because of new drilling and extraction technology. The last government assessment in 2002 suggested about 2 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas.

The Utica Shale, some experts believe, could be bigger still. Tom Stewart, executive vice president for the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, said more drilling and analysis is needed to fully comprehend the Utica.

Consider for a moment the vast increase of estimated gas reserves cited above:  from 2 trillion in 2002 to 84 trillion as of August 2011.  This is only covering the Marcellus Shale formation.  The Utica Shale formation “could be bigger still.”

And lest anyone think that the impact of these dramatic discoveries is limited to the energy industry, the article notes:

Also promising have been expressions of interest by the chemical industry about locating close to a rich supply of low-cost, natural gas. New Ohio natural gas could be a key feedstock of chemical production, Stewart said. That could prove a rich spin-off from the finds, he said.

Natural gas has been touted by some as a potential transitional energy source to renewables because it’s a cleaner fuel than coal and has reduced impact on climate change.

Ignore the bit about “climate change” which is bunk.  Nonetheless, few people in the U.S. today realize that our economic salvation is at hand.  I hope to post an article in the near future on the amazing energy wealth that has been discovered in the U.S., but for now it is enough to say that the advances in technology hold out the very real potential to revolutionize our economy with cheap and abundant oil and natural gas.   Beyond the huge number of new jobs in the industry itself nationwide, estimated by some at 1 million in the next seven years, imagine the many ripple effects.   Even the very announcement of a new policy to fully tap into our energy resources is enough to significantly affect the global price of oil and bring down U.S. energy costs, effectively pumping billions of dollars into the economy.   As the price of oil goes down, the money flowing to fascist states like Iran is severely restricted.   Want to bring down the tyrants in Tehran?  Bring the price of oil down to even $60 per barrel and the Mullahs’ economy crashes and burns.

Of course, this kind of commitment to energy independence is not going to happen under this Administration.  Nor is any, other sensible plan going to emerge that would free up private enterprise and restore the shaky nerves of consumers.   So, barring a dramatic change at the White House, it is time to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm.   We will all have to wait until November 7, 2012, the day after the national elections.   Assuming that the American people come to their senses and reject Obama for a second term, I am officially putting on my Nostradamus hat and predicting, here and now, that the economy will begin a dramatic comeback from that point onward.

To amend the proverb slightly, what the The New York Times giveth, The New York Times taketh away.

In this weekend story online, we see once again the duplicitous nature of the State Run Media:

CATARINA, Tex. — Until last year, the 17-mile stretch of road between this forsaken South Texas village and the county seat of Carrizo Springs was a patchwork of derelict gasoline stations and rusting warehouses.

Now the region is in the hottest new oil play in the country, with giant oil terminals and sprawling RV parks replacing fields of mesquite. More than a dozen companies plan to drill up to 3,000 wells around here in the next 12 months.

The Texas field, known as the Eagle Ford, is just one of about 20 new onshore oil fields that advocates say could collectively increase the nation’s oil output by 25 percent within a decade — without the dangers of drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the delicate coastal areas off Alaska.

There is only one catch: the oil from the Eagle Ford and similar fields of tightly packed rock can be extracted only by using hydraulic fracturing, a method that uses a high-pressure mix of water, sand and hazardous chemicals to blast through the rocks to release the oil inside.

The technique, also called fracking, has been widely used in the last decade to unlock vast new fields of natural gas, but drillers only recently figured out how to release large quantities of oil, which flows less easily through rock than gas. As evidence mounts that fracking poses risks to water supplies, the federal government and regulators in various states are considering tighter regulations on it.

This article uses the well-worn rhetorical technique that grudgingly acknowledges a seemingly good bit of news that runs counter to the Left’s narrative while seeking to undermine it entirely.   In this case, the NYT announces the incredible news of oil field discoveries within the continental U.S. that have the potential to exceed the daily output of entire, major oil producers but, alas, must point out that these gains may never be realized because (sigh) the process for extracting the oil “poses risks to water supplies.”   It is the poison pill.    Concede that which can no longer be concealed but include just enough disinformation or obfuscating facts as to render the entire portion unpalatable.   And so the NYT inserts the specious claim that “evidence mounts that fracking poses risks to water supplies…”  This is pure nonsense by the NYT.

A recent article by the Institute for Energy Research contains a good explanation of the process of fracking (or “hydraulic fracturing”) and points out that there the controversy over fracking is largely misleading if not fabricated.   My intention here, however, is not to explore the merits of the process itself and settle one way or another whether fracking is ultimately safe.   The aim here is to point out the dishonest approach that the Left uses in attempts to negate developments that threaten their narrative.

Powerline recently noted how The NYT was caught distorting the record on fracking.  Notice how the NYT article uses insinuation to mislead here as well.   Having been caught in their prior article claiming that there were “numerous documented cases” of water contamination caused by fracking, the NYT in this story resorts to the claim that “evidence mounts” with regard to the evils of fracking without stating any, actual instances where it has been documented or revealing that, in their own correction, the NYT stated that there are “few documented cases.”   The IER article goes further and states that there are no documented cases.

The Left’s narrative for America includes the notion that domestic energy supplies are non-existent.   If confronted on this fable, the Left claims that our resources are quickly shrinking and any newly discovered resources are too difficult, hazardous, expensive, or environmentally catastrophic to extract.   In essence, the Left’s narrative is for Americans to get used to expensive and scarce energy supplies that will necessarily mean a dramatic restructuring of society (loss of individual freedoms) that can only be accomplished by a domineering, central government.

When Obama says that we cannot “drill our way out of” high gasoline prices, he is engaging in this subterfuge.   When the lease of new oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico remains at a standstill for over a year with no, legitimate explanation, it is due in large part to the commitment of the Left in stopping all hydrocarbon use which forms a central tenet in their environmental religion.

Considering the diametrically opposed views of the Left and Right in this country, it may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of a Cold Civil War in which each election cycle offers another critical battle.  It is becoming increasingly clear that there is very little room for compromise with the Left.   Their vision for the U.S. is so foreign, so un-American (a phrase itself that used to have a clear meaning but has now been rendered ambiguous by the Left) that there can only be one side or the other that will survive.