Victor Davis Hanson:
Gasoline prices are on the verge of crashing down to below $2 a gallon. The price of oil may dip below $50 a barrel.
Even with renewed demand from a global economic resurgence, energy prices continue to fall. The U.S. has suddenly become the world’s largest combined producer of oil and natural gas.
That fact — along with a desire to weaken hostile Iran and Russia — has prompted the oil-rich Gulf sheikdoms to keep pumping oil even as the price falls. In their game of petro-chicken, the desperate sheiks hope that either their poorer enemies will run out of cash or that fracking in the U.S. will become unprofitable and cease.
Everyone seems to have forgotten about “peak oil” — the catchphrase of the new millennium.
The world in general, and the United States in particular, supposedly had already burned more oil than was left under the Earth. Under President Barack Obama, gasoline prices had soared. When he entered office in January 2009, gas prices averaged around $1.60 per gallon. Four years later, by spring of 2013, gas prices had climbed beyond $3.50 a gallon.
The Obama administration never much worried about high energy costs. During the 2008 campaign, Obama promised that “under my plan . . . electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” Shutting down coal plants and using higher-priced but cleaner natural gas would pave the way for an even pricier mandated wind and solar generation.
In the vice-presidential debates of 2008, Joe Biden mocked Sarah Palin for the supposedly mindless campaign mantra of “Drill, baby, drill.” Biden intoned that “it will take ten years for one drop of oil to come out of any of the wells that are going to be drilled.”
The energy secretary-designate, the professorial Steven Chu, in 2008 had unwisely voiced a widely held but wisely unspoken progressive belief that “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe” — or about $9 a gallon.
Just two years ago, when up for reelection, Obama reminded Americans, “We can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.”
Obama ridiculed the Republican idea of lowering gas to $2 a gallon through new oil-recovery techniques. “They’re already dusting off their three-point plans for $2 gas,” Obama mocked. “I’ll save you the suspense: Step one is drill, step two is drill, and step three is keep drilling.”
Such easy rhetoric was backed by action — or lack of it. The Keystone XL pipeline was put on permanent hold. New fracking leases on federal lands were postponed. Huge areas of oil- and gas-rich federal lands were put off limits. Some blue states stopped fracking. Money poured into solar schemes like Solyndra.
Decreased use of expensive energy was deemed desirable. Cash-strapped commuters would be forced to drive less, thereby advancing the noble cause of curbing supposed man-made global warming. Federal subsidies flowed for high-speed rail. Wind, solar, and other alternate energies could at last become competitive. Cap-and-trade legislation looked as if it might sail through Congress.
Unfortunately for the Obama administration, the new age of sky-high oil prices proved an economic disaster. The natural cycle of recovery never quite followed the end of the recession in mid 2009, as U.S. budget and trade deficits soared.
Abroad, all the wrong countries were empowered as never before.
One has to wonder just when liberals will realize that every one of their ideological stances are simply wrong. Anti-oil, anti-gun, global warming, social engineering…. all have failed, yet this is what liberals stand on, wanting for all for all the future.
Are there any nations that began as socialist governments? Haven’t they all been governments and societies that accumulated enough wealth to be distributed to sustain a socialist government…. until the riches played out?