Energy: Crisis? What crisis?

Anyone who wonders about the value of blogs need only look to George Reisman to see how the blog phenomenon has made an intelligent and perceptive writer into an enormously prolific one.

Reismans thoughts today are on energy, the apparent lack of it, and the solution to the reported long-term lack of it. As usual, his thoughts cut through the nonsense. The "solution to the energy crisis [a crisis with "no solution" according to the New York Times] is so blindingly obvious," he says.

The solution is: allow the oil companies to drill for oil—in Alaska, in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of California, on all the land mass of the United States now set aside as “wild-life preserves” and “wilderness” areas. Allow the construction of new atomic power plants! Stop interfering with the strip mining of coal! Stop interfering with the construction of refineries, pipelines, and harbor facilities necessary to the supply of oil and natural gas! This will increase the supply and reduce the demand for oil (this last because substitutes for it will be more readily available). All this can be summed up in very few words: Politicians and environmentalists, get the hell out of the way!

Instead, we are told that the oil companies are responsible for the scarcity of oil and its high price and should be punished for it. No! The truth is that the environmentalists and the politicians who support them are responsible.

This is not an energy crisis, it is a political crisis -- one equivalent to NZ's but on a larger scale. On one side are those trying to produce; on the other those trying to stop them; and on the sidelines are cheerleaders for the latter who are blaming the former for the problem. Put that way, perhaps the real crisis is one of incipient blindness, and a lack of reason...
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LINKS: Today’s New York Times’ Headline: “Energy Crisis: Many Paths but No Solutions” - George Reisman's blog
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TAGS: Energy, Economics, Politics, Environment