Gas is down to $1.65 a gallon here in South Carolina, and dropping.

It seems like only yesterday we feared industrial nations would need more oil than could be produced, and that we might even run out of oil.  The price of oil spiked upward, motivating scientists and entrepreneurs to search for new sources and methods for meeting the world’s growing need for affordable energy.

Pressed by our federal government, and rewarded with huge taxpayer-funded subsidies, domestic energy providers tried wind power, but that was a bust.  It quickly became evident that windmill farms are horribly inefficient, difficult and expensive to maintain, and damaging to birds.  Not to mention they are an eyesore.  Now thousands of rusting, inoperative windmills blot the American landscape, and the ones that still work require ongoing federal cash infusions.

Solar power didn’t work either.  The cost per unit of power produced was even worse than wind, requiring financial support from taxpayers to bring it to market.  Solar panels take up too much real estate, are subject to weather, and could only provide a small part of our electrical needs even in the best of circumstances.  In the scramble for easy government money, corruption in the solar power industry was rampant.

The government even forced us to add ethanol to gasoline, despite estimates by scientists that corn ethanol production uses six times more energy than it produces.  The push toward ethanol threw a monkey wrench into the agricultural industry.

But while the federal government (like always) failed miserably to solve the problem, the free market (like always) came through with flying colors, finding a way to affordably meet our current and future energy demands.  Guess what?   It’s still oil and natural gas.  Thanks to new high-tech methods of finding and tapping oil and natural gas reserves with a small and ecologically benign footprint, we now have an overabundance of available energy.

So now we can get rid of the expensive, corrupt, and unproductive taxpayer subsidies for solar power, wind generators, electric cars and ethanol plants, right?

Sigh.

Today our congressmen and women are voting on yet another bloated omnibus spending bill which includes:

• a five-year extension of the solar investment tax credit (ITC)
• a five-year extension of the wind production tax credit (PTC)
• an increased allocation to the Department of Energy, most of which gets used for subsidies and contracts to politically-connected cronies
• a three-year extension of the land and water conservation fund (LWCF), which will result in even more government ownership of resource-rich land

The uber-rich will still get $7500 from taxpayers for each $100,000 Tesla electric car they buy.  The owner of Tesla will rake in millions more in subsidies.  Meanwhile your own ten-year old Chevy will die prematurely from burning 10% ethanol while the prohibitive price of beef erases steaks and roasts from your grocery list.  And the pure gas you buy for your boat, which can’t use ethanol, costs 70 cents per gallon more than the stuff with ethanol added.  Huh?
I think I know who is in charge of our energy policy.  Larry, Curly, and Moe.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

Hey Moe!  Hey Moe!
Well, nyuck nyuck nyuck nyuck!
La da dee, la da dee!
Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo!

The Curly Shuffle – Jump N’ the Saddle Band