Warming Up to High Heating Bills

Our current state of comprehensive high fuel prices is simply the cost of unregulated environmentalism. Now is the time for the feds to take action. Every single environmental rule and regulation needs to be analyzed for its real measurable economic effect, and those that have been shown to contribute to our current energy situation should be tossed.

There are several specific things that should be done (and some of these have been implemented to some degree with the recent hurricane effects):

 

1. The EPA needs to permanently get rid of the myriad of gasoline formulas and settle on one, preferably the one for which most of our refineries are already designed to produce.
2. The Energy Department needs to put a moratorium on all new natural gas-fired power plant proposals, including those currently under construction, which should be converted to coal-fired technologies.
3. The Energy Department also needs to rid the Northeast of its dependence on home heating oil, and concurrently renew the concept of using coal for home heating. A combination of taxes on home heating oil and tax breaks for conversion to coal for home heating would be prudent. The more petroleum we can save for transportation needs, the better. Canada uses coal for home heating in useful numbers, why not the U.S.?
4. The de facto ban on building new hydropower facilities (due mainly to ESA and various wilderness-type designations on rivers and streams with hydropower potential) must be lifted at once, and new projects put on the fast track.
5. The U.S. must lift its bans on offshore drilling off the coasts of California and Florida, as well as ANWR.
6. The only way new refineries are going to get built is if we make it profitable for petroleum industry investors to do so. #1 above is the first step, and now it may also be necessary to add federal loan guarantees to the mix to ensure such construction happens promptly.
7. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, we need to hard wire into legislation a permanent ban on any so-called "carbon taxes", kind of an Anti-Kyoto if you will. We all know that coal is going to be the primary energy source for the next hundred years or so (presumably until newer technologies can be had at the commercial level), so any disincentives to maximizing our nation's use of coal could be absolutely disastrous. Investors need to know now that some future administration or global body will not be able to slap an eco-tax on their projects, given the long term ROI needs of coal based energy systems. We have enough coal under our soil to provide for enough synthetic diesel fuel and synthetic natural gas to guarantee that more than 60% of our hydrocarbon sources are domestic.

Dave Smith
Independent Researcher