If you wanted to bring western civilization down, give it a good beating for all its so-called malfeasance, what better way than to make it near impossible to sustain the things that made being a western civilization all it was cracked up to be?
Consider that which makes us or any of our allies any sort of global power? Wealth and energy. Commerce, industrialization, transportation, and militarization to protect it or project it.
We can mince the finer points about what makes all this possible but they all share one thing in common. Cheap, abundant energy.
So if you had a mind to take the average Western Civilization down a notch or two, or even all of them, to make an example of a country like, say America, the fastest way to do that would be to cry wolf about something that would be difficult to dispute and easy to frighten people with; something that would make cheap abundant energy so threatening that no one would pay much attention to the real threats that not having it might present; you’d put forward a theory of global catastrophe that demanded we redirect massive amounts of wealth into expensive forms of energy incapable of sustaining the level of commerce, industrialization, transportation, or defense that we’ve come to enjoy.
You’d invent Global Warming and then blame the people who make the cheap abundant energy for causing it.
It is a simple fact that you can’t run an aircraft (personal, pleasure, commercial or military), a fleet of ships (or any ship), large amounts of ground transportation, an army, or anything meaningful on wind, solar, or even ethanol. (Without getting side-tracked on how ethanol is actually worse from creation to application). In fact there are no “clean” energies in the American left’s “solution” to the problem they’ve invented (in America even nuclear energy is not ‘clean’) that would allow us to continue to engage the world in any meaningful way. The left’s energy plan systematically denies us our commercial/industrial prowess, reduces or eliminates the size and scope of our national defense, forces us to be more reliant on other nations (many of them hostile) for what cheap energy we are allowed, and would inevitably limit our ability to move about our own country and our world with as much freedom as we’d like.
(Fracking and Natural Gas have grown in this void but the left still does not approve. Even cheap easily acceible energy from friendly Canada (Keystone pipeine) was and is blocked. Why? Becasue they slow the desired decline. Only threats to their hold on power soften the negative rhetoric but just the rhetoric–no meanigful concessions are ever given.
And this is how it has been for years.
Fo decades the left has been doing everything they can to make “being an energy rich America” difficult or as expensive as possible. They have prohibited new development, blocked domestic refining capacity, taxed, feed, and regulated growth in energy to a stand-still, and kept nuclear from being anything but an expensive and frightening proposition. Every and any reason will do up to an including unsubstantiated threats of planet wide apocalypse. This has made the energy we can develop more expensive, impacting everything else in the process. Revenue spent on the rising cost of energy is not spent elsewhere. This means less growth, lowered GDP, fewer jobs, less choices and opportunities.
The left has admitted that it wants gas to cost more, to end coal as we know it, to control our thermostats (through fear and guilt first, price pressure, or even the law if necessary), so they can make their less useful alternatives comparable in price.
And for what? A theory that continues to lose support. And it is losing support because despite pumping CO2 into the air at increasing rates the world just continues to do what it always did. It gets warmer here, colder there, less ice up north, more ice down south, and after nearly two decades of “boys who cry global warming wolf” the average global temperate is exactly the same.
It can’t be for any other purpose but than to bring us down. To break us before the global court of opinion and allow other nations to fill the gaps we leave behind. And there is still significant political will in the United States, on the left, to move forward with the green energy agenda that makes our decline possible. To continue to deny billions for productive purposes so they can dump billions of public dollars into energy solutions whose only result will be less of everything that makes us an advanced and powerful western civilization. Into things that would make us just another chess piece on a global board occupied by China, India, and Russia–all of whom are to be respected as global partners but whom have no qualms about the need for cheap abundant CO2 producing energy to keep their nations running and growing; to sustain a military capable of projecting their worldview when and where they will feel the need; to protect their global interests, including those on continued access to cheap, abundant, energy. So it cannot be a political will to move us into the next century unless it is to do so on our knees.
There is no other excuse for this behavior but to steward the accelerated decline of America as a nation unable to compete, one with a stunted manufacturing base and a small military it cannot afford to project to defend its own global interests, one that might not even be able to adequately defend its own borders.
Yes, we’d be able to lob some rockets about, but everything else relies on fuels that have been demonized, the same ones that allow you to get to work, travel (things the left wants to build public trains to replace), heat your home, and in some cases–like coal–use all the modern devices that run on electricity without breaking the bank. And consider that reduced production of these fuels would require the state to divert them to the governments purposes as a matter of national priority–to run the things that the government needs that cannot be run without them–leaving the rest of us, citizens, those industries not favored by connected corporatists, to scrabble over the unsatisfying scraps left for us by the state.
Forget sustaining a free and powerful nation that can live without constant fear from its enemies. You can’t even keep your population comfortable under those terms. Not that the leaders of the socialist left care. They’ll be very comfortable.
Steve has been recognized as the Americans For Prosperity Blogger of the month for December 2012
The New Media Militia 