With thousands of data inputs, a professor in the BBC shows the progress the world has made in health and wealth over the last 200 years. He work shows the way most of the less developed countries have caught up in recent years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo&feature=player_embedded
His purpose is to show progress in health and wealth. Mine is different. If you don’t think you are going to face $5-$10 gasoline in the next 5-10 years, take another look. The growth in wealth in the emerging countries includes a growth in energy demand. We have hogged 25% of the world’s energy for many years. Crude oil supply is just holding it’s own, at best. Peak oil, it’s called. The US is going to compete with these emerging nations for our share of that oil. That’s called supply and demand. As the demand pushes up dramatically in these emerging countries, the price will push up with the demand. The same is true with food prices and other commodities.
Meanwhile, in our ignorance and arrogance, we do nothing to prepare for that situation. We have stopped offshore drilling again. We ignore natural gas as a transportation fuel. We pump billions into wind and solar which will be cost -equivalent to $5-$10 gasoline. We stopped nuclear. We are stopping coal. We stopped much of our manufacturing capability due to our devotion to the planet.
Use you own common sense. Chart the next 20 years for America. We are a big country geographically. We need a lot of energy. We need competitive energy, if not cheap energy. What if we have neither? How do we defend ourselves? How do we run our economy? How do we move goods around?
You can drink all the green energy job Kool-Aid you want to drink. I’m not drinking. Being in the energy business I have watched our government make every possible mistake you can make when it comes to energy strategy and energy policy. From Jimmy Carter’s price controls that created the lines for gasoline, to the DOE which has chewed up billions in 25 with nothing to show for our money, to Three Mile Island and the end of nuclear, to every president promising to end our dependence on foreign crude, to dozens of congressional hearings with oil company CEO’s taken to the woodshed for government’s problems, to Obama playing politics with the BP mess. The bottom line nothing happens and our position gets worse.
It’s going to be sad to see our bubble drop on the good professor’s chart to due our leadership void.
