A bad speech from every angle.

The president spoke to the American people on the subject of the continuing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico Tuesday night and practically nobody likes what he said. If you’re President Obama and you give a speech that even Keith Olbermann tears to pieces on MSNBC, you know you’ve had a bad night.

Obama’s hard left base is mad at him because they believe he didn’t go hard enough on British Petroleum in particular and the oil industry in general. Obama’s base won’t be happy until he actually seizes BP’s assets, however little he lacks such authority under the Constitution and U.S. law.

Conservatives like me didn’t like the speech for an entirely different set of reasons.

He spent the last third of the speech on the same drivel that we’ve heard from presidents of both stripes since Jimmy Carter. He talked about pursuing so-called “clean energy,” he talked about the inevitable pain of the “transition” away from oil and, of course, he invoked the now tired comparison of America’s pursuit of such energy nirvana to the Apollo lunar landing missions (never mind that he scratched manned spaceflight from his federal budget proposal earlier this year).

What no politician who proposes the nebulous pursuit of so called “clean” energy will ever tell you is that number one, oil is a lot cleaner than you think, number two, so long as it remains the cheapest, most portable, most accessible form of energy on earth, industrialized countries are going to use it lest they suffer enormous economic hardship, and number three, the U.S. has billions of barrels of oil in untapped reservoirs that have been put off limits by over zealous environmental regulation.

Let’s talk first about oil as polluter. Yes, the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is tragic on a biblical scale and yes, the nation will likely suffer ill effects for many years after the BP deepwater well is capped.

But having said that, let’s look at oil’s overall record. Oil is the energy source of choice for transportation. Nothing else comes close. And its use is cleaner than it has ever been. More people drive more cars more miles in America than ever before and yet the air over American cities is cleaner than it was in 1970.

We have approximately half the number of refineries in America that we had in 1970 and yet those refineries are producing more gasoline, jet fuel, diesel fuel and home heating oil than ever before. That means that each refinery is running at capacity all the time, making accidents more likely, and yet when have you heard of an environmental disaster at an American oil refinery?

Oil drilling on dry land is one of the safest of all industrial activities from an environmental standpoint and yet we have so severely restricted onshore drilling that it has become necessary to drill for oil in deep water far from shore on the very edge of the engineering envelope. As a result, rather than protect the environment, we have unwittingly unleashed an environmental disaster.

Another problem I have with President Obama’s speech is the fact that he, and his fellow travelers on the left, are not willing to tell you that in order for the American economy to use less oil, we will have to lower our standard of living and dramatically reduce economic opportunity for every single American.

China and India are going to keep using oil because it’s cheaper and more readily usable for transportation than any other form of energy. If America places carbon taxes or other taxes on the use of oil, America will be at an economic disadvantage that it cannot overcome.

The next form of energy will come to the fore in the world only when the real cost (not the fiat cost created by taxation) of discovering and producing oil rises to the level that it makes economic sense to derive energy from some other source.

And whatever that source, it will come from the earth and it will impose its own environmental costs.

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Paul Gleiser

Paul L. Gleiser is president of ATW Media, LLC, licensee of radio stations KTBB 97.5 FM/AM600, 92.1 The TEAM FM in Tyler-Longview, Texas.

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7 Responses

  1. Linda Montrose says:

    I did not see the actual speech, I was at work. But I did see parts of it on the news…so here is the impression I got. It reminded me of “take your child to work day” at the office where Mommy or Daddy took junior to work and put him behind the desk. He looked like a CHILD flaying his hands around trying to imitate some car salesman trying to drum up business. Obama was so out of place, if it weren’t so serious, it would be funny.

  2. Alice Smits says:

    8 years of Bush and now 4 of Obama. God help us.

  3. Ken Smith says:

    You hit the nail on the head. Ridiculous environmental regulation is cripling this country. In California, a tiny fish that no one ever heard of caused the most fertile valley in all the earth to be deprived of water. Most liberals, even if they claim they believe in God, say that evolution is science, natural selection, is how things evolve, yet they wish to selectively choose what gets selected. This type of thinking acually lends credence to the idea that some people micght have indeed come from rocks.

  4. L Miles says:

    Here is an observation based on my 40 years of experience, something that novice Barack Hussein Obama (BHO) knows nothing about, and it can be expressed by the following equation:

    ((Bureaucracy + Incompetence) * Accountability) / (Government Control) = (Results that Approach the Limit of Zero)

    This is simply “Common Sense Guided by Experience”. There is no substitute for experience.

    Academics (BHO advisers) without experience have a superiority complex that can not be penetrated because of their “not invented here attitude”. The “school of hard knocks” teaches all of us the values as expressed by the brilliance of our founding fathers, i.e., “Limited Government”. In the last few decades, we have put our faith in the wrong people (propagandists) as leaders when they are, in fact, self-camouflaged Socialists.

    One more thing: I have a question about the BHO philosophy regarding “pigs”.

    Is “lipstick on a pig” (quoting BHO) equivalent to an incompetent President APPEARING to fix the gulf oil gusher in Federal waters over 50 days late?

  5. James says:

    While fighting to kill off our offshore drilling along with the rest of the oil industry in this country, the fact remains that 2 BILLION dollars was given by the B Hussein Obama administration to aBrazillian oil company for DEEP WATER OFFSHORE DRILLING. What a hoax and sham this entire political scheming bunch of crooks is. Throw all those bums out and get those firemen from the Nextel commercial to run the country!

  6. B REES says:

    We have a bunch of people, in the White House, who know nothing about how to take care of this problem, and bho is not a leader. All he can do is sit on the side lines and blame everyone else. There should have been action on his part, bho, ASAP, a calling of all the great minds, to seek help from all over the world. bho is all talk and the action he put forth is not acceptable.

  7. L Miles says:

    I NOW believe that BHO is not incompetent or overwhelmed with the management of the world’s largest bureaucracy as President due to his total lack of experience. He is, in fact, a cunning, petulant, self-appointed, elitist that is on a god-like mission to teach this country a lesson regarding the evils of an economy that is based on energy derived from environmentally damaging and risky drilling and mining to obtain fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas, etc.)

    Remember his statement: “The US consumes 25% of the global energy available and has only 5% of the world’s population.” Only a shallow bigot that has swallowed the Marxist dogma of “shared prosperity” and “social justice” could spread this half-truth with a straight face.

    We need to accept the obvious. At every turn, he is using the gulf oil disaster to advance his demented energy goals by allowing the “inertia and red tape” of the EPA and its constituent agencies, i.e., Fish and Wildlife, etc. to hamper and stall the cleanup that should have started over 50 days ago. He knows that his malfeasance in office will be covered up by his propaganda machine (the mainstream media) while the gulf coast is ruined by the lack of preventative action. He believes that the outrage against BP and the rest of the energy industry will usher in his high tax energy policies that the Democrat Socialists in Congress are trying to pass before the November elections. The demise of the fishing industry and wildlife along the gulf coast is just another casualty of his WAR on American (unfair) prosperity.

    Just like the recently passed so-called health care law that is destined to replace the current health care system with a Federal monopoly, his energy policies will force the cost of energy to such a high level that a Federal takeover will be imminent. Let’s stop making excuses for the BHO man-child and realize he is simply bringing about the CHANGE that he promised in his campaign. Please see the BHO energy policy at the following link:

    http://obama.3cdn.net/4465b108758abf7a42_a3jmvyfa5.pdf

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