No, No, No!

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D91DVH680&show_article=1

Obama's first comment says it all. John McCain's proposal to allow offshore drilling "makes absolutely no sense at all". Then he proceeds to run out a couple of the Democratic talking points. I’m not worried if drilling on the continental shelf will only lowering gas prices by cents. I’m much more worried about gas being $10 per gallon in 10 years if there is not dramatic action to develop domestic supplies.

Why not let the oil companies explore? If it really turns out that in 2030 we don’t need the oil, then the oil companies took the risk and get screwed. Obama should love that.

So Obama is against developing new domestic oil supplies. He is against nuclear, which is the only technology available for the foreseeable future that can provide baseline electricity with no carbon emissions.

True plug-in cars are still science fiction. The battery technology simply does not exist. No one has figured out how to produce free hydrogen economically, or without fossil fuels. There is no technology on the horizon for truly clean coal. The technology exists to eliminate most of the non-carbon emissions. But there is no technology available to eliminate carbon emissions – even though the Bush Administration is working on it. Under the Bush Administration, the DOE has already been put on track to spend $150B in alternative fuel technologies in Obama's 10 year timeframe.

Obama and the liberals, and some Republicans, suffer from “miracle thinking”. They think that we are close to a breakthrough. That if we “just spend a little more money, the solution will be achieved.” They also suffer from “all or nothing” thinking. The only answer is breakthrough alternative technologies, and nothing else. They also think that conservatives also suffer from “all or nothing” thinking – favoring only the development of new fossil fuel production. This is demonstrably false. And politicians of all strips all suffer from an inability to understand that long term problems require long term solutions. Politicians always grab at the “quick fix”, which is usually no fix, or makes the problem even worse.

Only conservatives seem to be able to lay out a balanced attack that is actually realistic. Liberals can’t make the “least bad choice”. We are in a situation where there is no miracle waiting around the corner. We have to employ every technology as well as appropriately use fossil fuels and rapidly accelerate nuclear. John McCain called this week for building 45 new nuclear plants by 2030. Spend the $150B on alternative technologies. But if that’s all we do we will effectively put a cap on our economic development – which is probably what Obama really wants anyway. Obama policies will create an energy crisis in electrical energy generation that will simply lead to more coal being burned.

Here is an amusing point. The one of the anti-nuclear crowd‘s main objections is what to do with the waste. Of course you store it in the ground under Yucca mountain, if Harry Reid wasn’t such a nuclear obstructionist. Until then it is being stored underground or underwater on site at our nation’s 104 nuclear plants. But the “alternative technology” for truly clean coal is some form of carbon sequestration. In other words, they want to figure out how to bury it underground!

Do you really think that a relatively small amount of nuclear waste, much of which is reprocessed in the newer plants, is a greater danger that the hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds of carbon that we are pumping into the atmosphere each year?