Energy obfuscation at the White House

Llewellyn King:

The most frequent practitioner of this verbal contortion is the president's press spokesman, Jay Carney. It is as though he's a magician who has promised to pull out a live rabbit from his top hat. This conjurer stands before his audience, recites some incantations and, poof, retrieves not a live rabbit from the hat but a dead chicken. 

What magician Carney does, as well as other members of the president's staff and those at the Department of Energy, is to start by talking about oil and switch to talking about "alternatives." 

The alternatives, with the exception of the nettlesome subject of biofuels (nettlesome because they produce little or no energy above what's invested in producing them), are ways of making electricity. 

The administration is adept at confusing these almost unrelated subjects. 

Oil is the stubborn problem. It affects every aspect of life and prosperity, from the balance of payments to war planning, from economic growth to our relationship with China. Worse, it may be in constrained supply for the rest of time as the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) continue to suck up the precious commodity. 

New finds and new technology relieve this gloom for a while, but as demand rises and supply struggles to adjust, that future is known - even if Washington conservative think tanks and trade groups fight the notion of structural shortage. 

The United States isn't short of electricity and has no need ever to be. 

The electricity problem, if there is one, is an environmental one. Do we continue to burn coal on a massive scale while we search for an environmental fix? Or do we go wholeheartedly for nuclear, despite the fact that the Obama administration has abandoned the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada and has settled for a decision not to decide (maybe in this century) on waste disposal? 

Solar, wind, geothermal, wave power, even biomass, are technologies that come under the rubric of "alternatives" - and they're all electric technologies. 

Then there's natural gas, thought to be exhausted in the United States in the 1970s, now in abundance as a result of releasing it from shale with sophisticated technologies in drilling and hydraulic fracturing. That's another electricity fuel in abundance. 

It's enthusiasm for alternatives (a longtime love affair on the left of the Democratic Party) that has encouraged the confusing White House utterances about a policy of "all of the above." 

It's this that has spread the public perception that the president can do something about the price of gasoline. It's this that makes him vulnerable to Republican scorn over debacles like the loan guarantees to solar array manufacturer Solyndra.

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The White House talks about electricity because Democrats think electric cars are the answer, even though people do not want them because of their limited range and exorbitant cost.  But it is behind their backing of all the boondoggles from bankrupt solar companies to bankrupt battery manufacturers.  They have become true believers in a failed technological model.  By going all in on this failure they are also trying to strangle oil and gas at a time when Americans still need it for their transportation needs and will need it into the foreseeable future.