Obama and his energy policy

The other day Holman Jenkins had an interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal in which he examined President Obama’s energy policy. Our President is trapped by his own rhetoric just when interesting things in energy are taking place.

Look at his recent decision to nix the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the United States. It will cost him votes, but he did it anyway. He has to do this despite seeing what’s going on around the world. He knows China and India are opening a new coal plant every week. He knows the huge amounts of fossil energy lying at humanity's feet won't be abandoned just because an American president says so. In addition, Canada's oil sands won't remain undeveloped; the oil will go to the Far East.

He’s smart enough to recognize the problems with the global warming theory. I have blogged on that many times in the past, so I won’t spend much time on it here. The theory may be popular, but the evidence has thus far eluded the tens of billions spent on climate science. The temperature data are so messy that they reveal no pattern connecting rising CO2 in the industrial age with temperature trends.

Obama is smart enough to realize these problems exist with the global warming theory. But he's also a political operator and an acolyte of radical theorist Saul Alinksy. He understands politics as a matter of power, and democratic politics as a matter of powerful coalitions cultivated and maintained with self-interest (aka money, money, money).
For Obama, oil and other traditional energy sources are connected with Republicans. Anything that's good for the oil industry is bad for the alternate power structure he's been trying to build with handouts and mandates for green energy. Remember Solyndra? Somehow he must justify the "investments" he's dishing out to placate a support base whose need for subsidies and regulatory favors jibes with the Democratic Party's need for donations. Oil sands are the "dirtiest" fossil energy, requiring great releases of CO2, so, of course, the green fanatics oppose it. To approve Keystone, then, would compromise his own credibility as a leader who can be trusted to deny advantage to "Republican" industries and deliver it to "Democratic" ones.

Obama is in a tight place. The natural-gas fracking boom has demolished his (the greenies) position that all ordinary energy sources are drying up, so we must turn to the uproven, unsteady, and expensive alternatives (hydrogen, solar, wind, etc.). For example, Solyndra must be defended all the more fiercely now that solar is collapsing globally as countries repent of foolish subsidies. Green energy must be hugged all the more tightly as the shale revolution renders hopeless any chance of wind and solar becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels.

Our poor President. Green energy metamorphosed from a policy notion into a political strategy and then into a dead weight his campaign must lug to November. That’s quite a risk he’s taking--spurning affordable, strategically convenient energy from Canada. We’ll see how it plays out this year as gas prices under his watch remain high.