Obama's Pre-failed Energy Policy

15 years ago I was sold on the idea of energy independence using biofuels. Ah, how the times they do a-change.

Barack Obama is hanging his energy hat on biofuels - an unproven technology on a mass scale, but with a technological sexiness that sounds like it might be right. Liberal dogma is such that if it sounds right, it's great policy, facts be damned. However, there's a downside to everything, and with biofuels it's the competition for agricultural areas worldwide pushing up the price of crops dramatically across the board - raising the price of both biofuels and food.

Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis | Environment | The Guardian:
"Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil."

This is the price of inexperience and naivete, a price paid by everyone other than Obama.

What's the answer? McCain has it partly right, but I don't think he knows why. The answer is electricity, a power source we can generate ourselves using a variety of means. McCain thinks that nuclear (nucular? I'd be willing to impeach Bush just for saying that word) is the answer, and he's right, but he never utters the words "electricity." Well, maybe he does think so, since he's offered a $300M bounty on a better battery.

But in the short term, we're bound to the energy source prevalent in the US for more than the last hundred years - oil. So we have to drill, at least in the short term to ease prices here at home and to buy time until we can get alternatives online.

But clearly, Barack is playing to his liberal environmentalist audience, who insist we all be in the poorhouse so their personal convictions will be eased. Such is liberalism.