When it comes to the energy policy, liberal Democrats talk a good game. Look at their actual record while in control of Congress in the last year and a half. It’s been nothing short of disastrous. Wasn’t it two years ago that then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi vowed, if her party took over Congress, to cut energy prices, especially gasoline?
“Democrats have a common-sense plan to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices by cracking down on price-gouging; rolling back the billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks and royalty relief given to big oil and gas companies; and increasing production of alternative fuels,” Pelosi wrote back in April 2006, as part of her efforts to convince Americans to elect Democrats. How’s that working for you? The cost of energy, measured by the price of West Texas Intermediate crude, is almost double. Under Pelosi’s common-sense plan, Congress has achieved nothing. Actually, less than nothing, considering that what little has been done has hurt, rather than helped the U.S. to become more self-sufficient. This year alone, we’ll spend $431 billion to buy 3.7 billion barrels of imported oil to run our economy. And in so doing, we are enriching some of the world’s most unsavory regimes. Ironically, we have plenty of oil ˜ at least 10 billion barrels in Alaska’s National Wildlife Reserve, 30 billion or so offshore and a whopping 1.2 trillion in Rocky Mountain oil-shale. But Democrats’ extreme green ideology keeps us from drilling for it. Clean coal technologies likewise have been put out of bounds. So is the most logical answer to our energy problem ˜ nuclear power plants that can be run safely with spent rods reprocessed. (Even the radical Green Peace endorses Nuclear Energy). France already does this to meet 80% of its energy needs. Democrats have focused instead on an insane global warming plan that would cost $1.2 trillion. Subsidies and other breaks for biofuels have helped send food prices soaring. Put the blame where the blame is due.
Rickey Dale Crain,
Shawnee
