While our government plans to spend billions of your tax dollars on futile green energy programs that will just be cabbage for lobbyists and swill for PHDs, something real happened. This event may offset further plans by your government to strap an added $900-3,000 in taxes on your energy consumption with their cap and tax plans.
The energy industry, you know those capitalistic pigs who get to go to Washington two or three times a year and take the blame for the failed government energy efforts have been quietly at work. Spending their money, not yours, to find energy here at home.
A discovery in Louisiana called the Haynesville Shale may hold up to 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That’s the equivalent of 33 billion barrels of oil. Almost 20 years of our current oil consumption. It doesn’t stop there. There are also big finds in Texas, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania. There may be as much as 100 years of current natural gas demand in these new fields.
Dr. Chu is less than excited about the prospects of putting all this new gas to work to make us independent and to replace gasoline and diesel for transportation. Why, there goes his $50 billion a year budget to produce jobs for fellow PHDs. There goes the incentive to try to make more good ideas work, like ethanol. There goes the need to government to bail us out of the energy mess, the free market will do that.
Here’s what I predict from this. We will get Cap and Tax, just as we are getting universal health care and free education for those who prefer not to have summer jobs, part-time jobs at school, or student loans like most of us did. We get to pay so they don’t have to go through all that. When Cap and Tax comes in, the smart businesses, just like those who just kept drilling for gas in the harshest and most expensive and highest risk places, will find ways to put this gas to work.
The government owned car companies, Chrysler and GM, will build the cars the government wants them to build. The other car companies will build cars that run on CNG. Compressed natural gas. Retail outlets will put in the equipment to provide the CNG. Consumers will put the CNG compressors in their garages and fill their cars at night while they sleep.Power plants will burn more natural gas and stiff the government on their Cap and Tax revenue for coal.
The government is planning for a windfall of billions from Cap and Tax. The free enterprise system will cut their take significantly. They always do outsmart the government on taxes. While the government fritters away billions in tax dollars trying fruitless ideas to create new energy, the private sector will use these great new discoveries to our advantage.
Every American will benefit from these discoveries. Every American will lose some of that benefit to the government with their energy plans and to Cap and Tax. But, the balance may be in favor of the consumer. This is much better than it would have been without this good news.
There be no credit to anyone for this news, not by Washington nor by the media. It’s a quiet event that means far more than most of the highly touted events comings of Washington for years.