The View From 1776

High Oil Prices – Blame The Government You Elected!
By Thomas D. Segel

Tom@thomasdsegel.com
http://www.thomasdsegel.com

Harlingen, Texas, April 28, 2008:  Yesterday I topped off my tank at $3.499 a gallon.  But, I am lucky.  My home is in one of the lowest cost-of-living regions of the country.  In California, for example, my brother filled up his tank again at $3.899 a gallon…and he shops for “cheap” gas. The high price of gasoline is on the lips of everyone you meet these days.  Also, everyone has his or her own idea about whom we should blame for our latest economic woes.

Those of us who dabble in writing politically oriented commentary expect to have our views challenged.  However, reflecting back on my multiple years of journalistic ranting, I can remember no article that generated more comment than last week’s “A Gallon of Milk, A Gallon of Oil and the Ethanol Hoax”.  While the majority of readers corresponding with me agreed with my attack on the liberal left and the environmental loonies who have caused most of our problems, there were still ample emails telling me I had no clue about the reality of our current plight.

My argument is very basic.  If any blame is to be assessed, it must be laid at the feet of our national government.  The problem starts with the price of oil, which everyone must agree is a commodity and seeks out the highest dollar buyers are willing to pay.  Supply and demand determine high and low prices.  To get lower prices you can either reduce the demand or increase the supply.  Now what has been controlled for more than 35 years?  Supply is the answer.  And who has controlled the supply of oil in the United States?  The answer to that big question is the United States Government.

We all know there is abundant oil in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.  We know more oil is in the Dakotas and even Wyoming.  We know there are huge deposits of oil off the California and Florida coasts.  We know there are tons upon tons of oil shale in the West.  We know that thousands of oil wells were capped and are no longer in production.  Deep deposits of oil at up to 16,000 feet and natural gas, more than 3 miles underground and off shore await us… and we know the technology exists to bring them to the surface.

We know that in the past three and one half decades no new oil refineries have been built, nor have the existing ones been modernized due to the restrictive rules and regulations placed upon the industry by governmental agencies.

While people are forced into making choices between buying gasoline to drive to work, or placing food on the table for their families, a few of our capped wells in California and other locales are being reopened.  In California alone, there are currently more than 3,000-capped wells and many have seen only between 20% and 25% of their oil extracted.  Some were capped just waiting for new technology and higher prices.  Many were capped due to environmental objections.  To be completely objective, we must also admit a large number were capped because they had turned into dry holes.

We have allowed the far left environmental movement to cripple the economy by its marriage to the Democratic Party and a few brain-dead Republicans.  We have allowed the left to keep screaming in our ears that everything is the fault of Big Oil. As the politicos chant this mantra, we buy into the false claim because most of us get our facts from bubbleheads in the media who also are without a clue to reality.

According to Walter Youngquist writing in “Myths and Realities of Mineral Resources”, the six largest Big Oil companies really belong to America.  He says, “Nearly 200 mutual insurance companies hold close to 16 million shares. Ninety-one colleges own these stocks and about 1,000 charities and educational foundations in the United States are holders of these oil company securities.  In direct ownership more than 2.3 million Americans hold stock in these six companies.”

Our own citizens, investing in these combined resources have allowed the “big” companies to drill some very expensive wells.  A single hole can cost a million dollars and more, without any assurance of success.  And this is the Big Oil that should be punished with higher taxes that politicos yell about in the national ear.

Another governmental con job is the political falsehood that oil deposits in such places as the wildlife refuge or off the Florida coast don’t contain enough resources to make drilling worthwhile.  Well, think about this. In the United States we use just under 20 million barrels of oil a day.  A field that produces 100 million barrels of oil is considered huge.  However, it takes years to use up the supply.  If that 100 million barrel field were used to supply America’s daily needs, it would be gone in less than a week. But, that never happens.  The oil is pumped over years and years.  So, when you hear the political chatter about there “is only about 90 days worth of oil in that Alaskan refuge...and it won’t pay us to drill there”, remember not a single field is ever used to supply needed oil, and a field that could supply 90 days worth of Black Gold is huge. That would be a field containing multiple hundreds of millions of barrels. It would be assisting in our nation’s energy needs for decades.

The other chant from the left is we can wean ourselves off our oil addiction by conservation.  There is nothing that can be saved through conservation efforts other than short-term relief.  If you conserved until your economy fell apart, it would still not increase the supply.  People fail to understand we can no longer rely upon our own resources for oil independence.  We passed the point of self-sufficiency in 1970.  Each year, as our population expands, our dependence upon foreign oil and other energy sources increases.  We now consume far more than we can create from our own resources.  The government has added to this burden by its massively restrictive regulations and mind-numbing pandering to the environmental left.

Removing governmental restrictions and adding to our refinery capacity would go a long way toward easing the heavy toll this major price hike has taken on both the national economy and the personal pocketbooks of Americans.  Increased drilling, combined with the small amount of relief that can be brought about by alternative energy would go a long way toward easing the bidding war of oil speculators.  That’s is not going to happen with the democratic majority in Congress.  They will continue to point their collective fingers at the oil companies and never admit to their own actions or non-actions that have caused this crisis. 

Read the Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial for today: The Fed’s Bender.

For more background on what the Fed has been doing, see Federal Intervention Always Has Negative Results, with its links to related postings on this website.

This week, Black Rock Congregational Church is focusing on worldwide missionary programs and the 20-plus missionaries that the church supports.  In that connection, rather than a traditional sermon, we at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) heard a report by Dr. Ted Noble, one of those missionaries.  His subject was the appalling decline of Christianity throughout Europe.

Fewer than one percent of Europeans are Christian believers.  Elsewhere, especially in Africa and Asia, the percentage is much higher and growing.  Europe has become a spiritual wasteland in which people look to the political state for their salvation. 

In the 19th century, Africa, the Dark Continent, was looked upon as the great field of activity for Christian missionaries.  Conditions are the reverse today.  American Episcopalians, for example, who seek a return to the Bible and a turning away from the secularized social gospel that has overtaken their church, now look to African bishoprics for support.

Dr. Nobel talked mostly about the opportunities and the needs for missionary work in Europe.  But it’s important also to ask why Europe is in spiritual decline.

This is an impelling question, since Christianity’s greatest, lasting impact was in western Europe.  After the final fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, Christianity was left as the only civilizing force in western Europe.  Without the Catholic Church in Rome, libraries and education itself would not have survived.  Concepts of civilized law and order, based upon the Roman Empire’s codex, were preserved in Christian canonical law.

The Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople (later Byzantium, today Istanbul), survived the onslaught of Islam for another thousand years until 1453.  But Constantinople was not able to exercise much direct influence upon western Europe after the fall of Rome.  Christian city states all around the eastern Mediterranean and into Russia, parts of the Eastern Orthodox Church, were continually subjected to Islamic jihad after the 7th century.

Europeans, before the evolution of strong nation states in the 16th century, thought of themselves as inhabitants of Christendom.  It is thus accurate to assert that everything that we know as western civilization is an exclusive product of Christianity emanating from the church at Rome. 

What went wrong?

The short answer is the French Revolution of 1789.

That cataclysmic event destroyed Christian civilization and instituted the religion of socialism, first in France, then throughout Europe. 

In the simplest terms, French philosophers of the ill-named Continental European Enlightenment (the 18th century) decapitated Western civilization.  The human soul and conscience, moral codes, and the relationship of each individual human to the universe and his fellow humans were tossed into the trash heap.  The Western world was figuratively reduced to a headless body that reacted blindly to external, physical stimulae. 

The secular, atheistic religion of socialism (in the United States, liberal-progressivism) ignores peoples’ spiritual needs.  It asserts, instead, that only material needs for water, food, clothing shelter, and sex count in political society.  In socialist religious theory, all of these things can be administered by the secular political state in ways that permit state planners to manipulate and control every aspect of human social behavior. 

No one can logically accept that liberal-socialist doctrine and simultaneously support the metaphysical, natural-law principles that were the basis of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, Jefferson’s inalienable human rights flowing from our Creator God.

Philosophical materialism implies that the human soul is a myth; there is only the physical tangle of nerves, muscle, and bones constituting the physical human body.  Non-material qualities like personal responsibility, piety, patriotism, and morality are dismissed as value judgments, lost in the morass of moral relativism.  Karl Marx, for example, sneered at religion as the opium of the masses, calling it a fiction created by the ruling class to stupefy and subjugate the workers.

Dismissing the Mind of God and the natural law that flowed from it, intellectuals of the French Revolution believed themselves capable of manipulating humans, in the mass, as if they were puppets.  They expected their secular religion of socialism to bring harmony and perfection to human life. 

Instead, they took the Western world back to the lawless days of the hordes of Genghis Khan, when the sword was the only source of order and right.  The millions of dead and maimed in two World Wars and the murders of tens of millions by the French Revolutionary councils, Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, and Castro are the legacy of French socialistic materialism and secularity.

Europe, once the driving force in world culture, has become a hollow shell that the inflow of Muslim immigrants will crack and overwhelm in coming decades, unless Christian missionaries succeed in bringing Europeans back to Jesus Christ.

In his April 18th column for the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne, Jr. expresses the misgivings of liberal-progressives who enjoy the ritual of religion, but don’t want to be bothered with following the teachings of Jesus.

Mr. Dionne writes:

The most jarring word that Pope Benedict XVI is using during his visit to the United States is “countercultural.” The American sense of that term is shaped by the 1960s: free love, drugs, hippies, rock music and rebellion. Needless to say, that’s not what Benedict is preaching.

That word is the key to understanding how Benedict’s message runs crosswise to conventional liberalism and conservatism. Benedict came to the United States as a quiet but forceful critic of “an increasingly secular and materialistic culture,” as he put it during yesterday’s Mass. Almost any American who paid attention to his sermon had to be uncomfortable because all of us are shaped by the very forces he was criticizing.

Benedict directly challenged an assumption so many Americans make about religion: that it is a matter of private devotion with few public implications.

The truth is that too many of us like to think of ourselves as saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ.  We think that it’s enough to give lip service to the Gospels on Sunday, while keeping our lives in a separate compartment for the remainder of the week.

This is what German pastor Dietrich Bonnhoeffer called cheap grace.  Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who openly defied the materialistic, liberal-progressive socialism of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) and paid for it with his life.

In The Cost of Discipleship, pastor Bonhoeffer wrote:

Instead of following Christ, let the Christian enjoy the consolations of his grace!  That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs.  Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin.  Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline.  Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.  Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Jesus, two thousand years ago, put his finger on the same phenomenon. 

No one was more versed than the pharisees in the texts of the Hebraic Bible and more learned about the requirements of the law emanating from Moses’s original covenant with God.  But, Jesus told them, true religion is based on the two greatest of God’s commandments: have no other god than God Himself, and love your neighbor as thyself.

Ritualistically following the law alone was not sufficient.  There had to be a softening of the heart that led to obedience to God’s commandments, to genuine concern for serving others and aiding the needy.

So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with ‘unclean’ hands?”

He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: 
” ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.  They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.” (Mark 7:5-8)

Unfortunately for nominal Christians and for politicians who seek the cover of church attendance while advocating the materialistic beliefs of the religion of liberal-progressive-socialism, the Pope is right.  You can’t be a Christian while defying Jesus in sexual promiscuity and marital infidelity; biological fathers who abandon their children and their family responsibilities can’t counterbalance their dereliction with athletic or business success; people who murder unborn babies cannot claim to love God.

A Gallon of Milk, A Gallon of Gas and the Ethanol Hoax
By Thomas D. Segel

Tom@thomasdsegel.com

Harlingen, Texas, April 24, 2008:  When I read the newspaper or view the nightly television news shows I can’t help but feel almost uncontrollable anger. And the truth is, I really don’t know where that anger should be directed. I listen to my fellow citizens anguish about the price of fuel, the price of food and sticker shock at everything they want to purchase. They have great concerns about the price of gas at the local station and the cost of milk at the super market.  And they blame the politicians for inaction, along with greedy farmers and Big Oil for high prices.  With their next breath they are crying for more of our corn based ethanol to help lower prices at the pump.  It is enough to make a rational person want to bash his or her head against the nearest hard object in complete frustration.

For the past thirty plus years we have allowed the environmental activists of the Democratic Party to stop all forward movement in our national quest for energy independence.  We know how to obtain oil from places such as Alaska, Wyoming and the Dakotas, but legislation to drill has been blocked.  We know oil is waiting offshore, but we are not allowed to drill due to environmental impact, even though other nations are reaching for that same oil, just a few miles away.

We have even allowed these same activists to stop the building of new oil refineries for the past 30 years.

Our energy demands from abroad could be reduced by nuclear power, but the socialist led environmentalists have swayed enough pandering politicians to stop the production of nuclear power plants.  Other socialist-activists who hide behind the green wall of environmentalism have slowed the much touted wind farms of this country to almost a standstill.  When construction is almost at hand there is always another call for a study to see if these wind farms will kill migrating birds, or perhaps block Ted Kennedy’s oceanfront view.

Though the United States has enough coal to handle the majority of our energy needs for decades, political roadblocks keep on appearing to slow the rapid development of coal based technology.

While on the topic of energy concerns, lets not forget the political love affair with corn-based ethanol.  To say this bio fuel is a gigantic con game perpetrated by corn producers and politicos would be an understatement.  We must add into the mix major corporations that keep the myth of reduced dependence on oil alive, because they are financially invested in bio-fuels.

When we examine the politician’s incessant praising of corn based ethanol, we fail to understand these are really people who are prostituting themselves for more votes and financial support from the agro-community. 

Ethanol, as we produce it today, is 20% less efficient than gasoline.  It takes 450 pounds of corn to produce enough ethanol to fill the tank of the average American automobile. (Think about that for a minute.  It also takes about 450 pounds of corn to feed one person for a year.) It is too corrosive to be shipped via pipeline and must be trucked to distribution points.  Added to these negatives…it takes more than one gallon of fossil fuel, coal, oil, or natural gas, to produce one gallon of ethanol.

Writing on the Mother Jones website, Cameron Scott says, “To grow enough corn for ethanol to replace our oil addiction would require approximately 482 million acres of cropland. exceeding the total of 434 million acres of cropland used for all food and fiber.  This does not even account fro projected growth of oil consumption in the U.S.”

Added to these problem areas, ethanol production increases, rather than reduces, environmental concerns.  Production requires the application of petroleum-based fertilizers that have contributed heavily to the emission of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.  To produce a gallon of ethanol requires three to five gallons of water and results in 13 gallons of toxic trash and wastewater.  It takes the energy equivalent of 113 liters of gas to treat this waste.

Dr. Walter Williams, the distinguished author, columnist and professor at George Mason University says, “The grain based ethanol hoax is a sterling example of a program economists refer to as narrow, well-defined benefits versus widely dispersed costs. It pays the ethanol lobby to organize and collect money to grease the palms of politicians willing to do their bidding because there is a large benefit to them – higher wages and profits.  The millions of fuel consumers, who fund these benefits through higher fuel costs and food prices, as well as taxes, are relatively uninformed and have little clout.”

So, we tolerate $6.00 corn used to produce $2.00 ethanol, which is also subsidized by the government to the tune of $1.05 to $1.38 per gallon, because it would not survive on the free market.  Thus, we allow the costs to each of us personally to increase even more, because those subsidies come directly from our tax dollars.

But, we haven’t finished here.  How about that box of cereal, or that steak, or that gallon of milk?  Have you checked market prices lately?

Last night a woman on the evening news was telling the reporter that, “ I had to choose between paying about $3.50 for a gallon of gas, or buying a gallon of milk for my children.”

A convenience store operator told the news reporter that the high price of gas had resulted in him losing customers.  “People don’t fill their tanks”, he said.  “And they don’t come in to the store and buy things like they did before.  I am making much less money in my business.”

Yes, prices have sky rocketed on everything from beef to milk and cereal to soda pop.  Even beer has jumped in price, because corn and other grains are being diverted into producing fuels.

Reporting in the Des Moines Register, Philip Brasher has noted “A Senate-passed energy bill would require the use of 15 billion gallons of ethanol by 2015, more than double what motorists are expected to use this year.  The mandate would be raised to 36 billion gallons by 2022.”

At the same time difficulties in transporting the bio fuel to distant locales have produced a glut of ethanol in Iowa and Nebraska, thus dropping the price by 50 cents a gallon and, of course, increasing the subsidies paid to the producers. Even with this happening dozens of plants are under construction and current distilleries are being expanded. More corn is being planted to feed the bio fuel industry and less corn and other grains are being raised to feed the hungry.

So, as you look at high prices everywhere there are a lot of people you can blame.  You can point your rage at Big Oil, Big Industry, Big Farmers, Big Politicians…and on and on. But, the person you really should be angry at owns that face you see every day in the mirror.  Too many of us expected the politicians to be fathers, mothers and nannies combined.  What they really ended up doing is stealing our modern way of life.