By now, it’s been abundantly revealed why our current president admires Ronald Reagan: affection for fairy tales.
To wit, this amazing piece of Reaganesque wishfulness in President Obama’s 2010 Earth Day speech:
obama fairy tale
Think about it: roughly a century and a half ago, in the late 1850s, the Seneca Oil Company hired an unemployed train conductor named Edwin Drake to investigate the oil springs of Titusville, Pennsylvania. Around this time, oil was literally bubbling up from the ground — but nobody knew what to do with it. It had limited economic value and often all it did was ruin crops or pollute drinking water.
Now, people were starting to refine oil for use as a fuel. Collecting oil remained time consuming, though, and it was back-breaking, and it was costly; it wasn’t efficient, as workers harvested what they could find in the shallow ground — they’d literally scoop it up. But Edwin Drake had a plan. He purchased a steam engine, and he built a derrick, and he began to drill.
And months passed. And progress was slow. The team managed to drill into the bedrock just a few feet each day. And crowds gathered and they mocked Mr. Drake. They thought him and the other diggers were foolish. The well that they were digging even earned the nickname, “Drake’s Folly.” But Drake wouldn’t give up. And he had an advantage: total desperation. It had to work. And then one day, it finally did.
One morning, the team returned to the creek to see crude oil rising up from beneath the surface. And soon, Drake’s well was producing what was then an astonishing amount of oil — perhaps 10, 20 barrels every day. And then speculators followed and they built similar rigs as far as the eye could see. In the next decade, the area would produce tens of millions of barrels of oil. And as the industry grew, so did the ingenuity of those who sought to profit from it, as competitors developed new techniques to drill and transport oil to drive down costs and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Now, our history is filled with such stories — stories of daring talent, of dedication to an idea even when the odds are great, of the unshakeable belief that in America, all things are possible.
The childishness and/or dishonesty in this story is, as the kids say, epic.
Petroleum is petroleum. As James Howard Kunstler explains this elementary point:
Oil is an amazing substance. It stores a tremendous amount of energy per weight and volume. It is easy to transport. It stores easily at regular temperature in unpressurized metal tanks, and it can sit there indefinitely without degrading. You can pump it through a pipe, you can send it all over the world in ships, you can haul it around in trains, cars, and trucks. You can even fly it in tanker planes and refuel other airplanes in flight. It is flammable but has proven to be safe to handle with a modest amount of care….It can be refined by straightforward distillation into many grades of fuel…and innumerable useful products….It has been cheap and plentiful.
Petroleum exists in the Earth’s crust in finite amounts. Thanks largely to overclass-imposed cars-first transportation policies, half of the planet’s supply is now, a mere 150 years after Titusville, gone, having been churned and burned into energy, heat, plastics, chemicals, and various forms of pollution.
But, instead of telling the truth about our energy situation and attacking the root of the problem, the supposedly smart change-agent-in-chief would have us believe that desperation (a mighty interesting analogy/admission, no?) and American-ness are somehow going to work their magic and not just rescue the present order, but bring it a new dawn.
If this weren’t a grave threat to my child and yours, I’d laugh and say “Good luck with that.” As it is, though, Obama and the Democratic Party are huge obstacles to sanity and survival and the major social and technological changes on which they depend.