I heard Peter Huber, the brilliant energy expert, lecture yesterday on an energy policy that weans the U.S. off foreign oil without major economic disruption and hardship.  Huber advocates for doing it by replacing petroleum and coal with natural gas, electricity, and nuclear power.

Huber bemoans the absence of any serious energy policy-making in Washington, D.C.  None of the frivolous "green" projects now proposed by environmental extremists who control the congressional agenda have any prospects of delivering the cheap, sustainable energy the U.S. requires to maintain and grow its standard of living.

What is the most basic thing the U.S. government could do to move the U.S. away from dependency on foreign oil?  Construct natural gas pipelines along all interstate highways to enable the replacement of gasoline and diesel engines with natural gas-driven engines.  Natural gas is cheap and plentiful in North America, and foreign oil is mostly necessary to fuel our long-distance transportation system.  By ensuring that natural gas is readily available to long-haul truckers on the interstate highway system, for example, the U.S. government could drive a gradual evolution from gasoline and diesel engines to natural gas...

Even better than natural gas (because it is much cheaper to produce and deliver over the existing grid) is electricity, which can be generated by green nuclear power plants.  Yet environmental extremists continue to block nuclear power plants despite dramatic improvements in safety and reliability.  And the Obama Administration's cancelation of the Yucca Mountain nuclear reprocessing facility at the behest of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is emblematic of how unserious Obama energy policy-makers are with respect to nuclear power.

President Barack Obama: on matters of serious energy policy, just another empty suit. 

< Prev		Next >