Energy policies come up against green initiatives

Wall Street Journal- November 5, 2008
Obama is surly a politician at heart that sold an incompatible idea to the American public. His ideas for pushing alternative energy and independence from foreign oil will never succeed with how his agenda is structuring the process. Obama wants to mandate 10 percent of electricity to be produced from renewable sources in four years, and 25 percent in about 13 years. Yes we must shift our energy sources from coal and oil, but the 10 percent will never be met because of the quantity of energy that is already produced, and the huge economic cost to build the power plants. So to create enough renewable energy the government must subsidize projects for both large utility companies and homeowners. Where will that money come from, a tax increase on someone if not everyone.
The second problem with Obama's initiatives is that he wants to decrease our dependency on foreign but also wants to ban offshore drilling. The US imports and consumes nearly three times the amount of oil as the next leading countries. The US consumes 20,000 thousand barrels of oil per day, and produces 8,330 thousand barrels of oil per day- so if we stop importing and ban alternative oil production methods then we have a 12,000 thousand barrel per day deficit. I suppose the argument is that the US should decrease consumption, but frankly we're not, we haven't, and we won't soon... like in four years.
Like I say again and again, we have to change because oil will stop, coal will not be found, air will become toxic, water will become poison, and life will cease, but the approaches by American politicians suck. American policy revolves around commerce and the economy, and the environment has no value, so politicians let it suffer at the expense of commerce.
Having visited Sweden I know that our energy situation can have dramatic improvements while increasing the quality of life for residents. Sweden has invested billions of dollars in energy policy to create a relatively oil-independent nation. The energy and environmental model of Sweden should be followed by the US because it actually works.

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