Michelle Bachmann recently promised that, if elected President, she would get gasoline prices back down to $2 per gallon, She reminded us that gas was $1.79 when President Obama took office.

Was this foolish campaign-speak? Probably not. An administration really dedicated to producing more U.S. energy could quickly make lots of progress—and probably encourage similar energy efforts world-wide.

The starting point: Presidential emphasis that the UN’s global warming models have already proved false. Instead of exponential man-made warming, we’ve had a normal step-change in the earth’s long, normal climate cycle: Roman Warming, Dark Ages, Medieval Warming, Little Ice Age, Modern Warming. The U.S. Solar Observatory now predicts a slow global cooling during the next Presidential cycle. That implies only another 0.5 degrees of natural cyclic warming over the net several centuries. Then earth will get another “little ice age” that will make people long for global warming again.

Millions of Americans might not believe such a statement—but just as many now would. Public belief in man-made warming has plummeted during the recent non-warming years. Bachmann could present the climate cycle evidence from the ice cores and fossil pollen—and from the new high-quality cosmic-ray experiment at CERN in Geneva. Her statements could force our major media to present a broader climate picture than they have.

Next easy step: Restart normal government permitting for oil and gas drilling. Exxon has three big new oil finds in the Gulf that could be the biggest Gulf field ever. Exxon can’t get production permits; Ditto for Shell in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska. Go back to permitting “normal” drilling permits on federal lands ashore. Should we drill off the U.S. East Coast?

More controversial: Rescuing mountain-top coal mining in West Virginia. The “environmental” case against this is trivial. Underground mining continues to risk miners’ deaths and more unemployment. Unlike Obama’s bankrupt solar panels, this would keep working long-term, even though it is visually ugly.

On to shale gas and oil, the new wunderkinder of world energy: The U.S. has a great deal of both, most of it just beginning to be tapped. The New York Times recently crowed that the latest estimate of U.S. shale gas potential is less than the 410 trillion cubic feet estimated this year by our Energy Information Administration.

Even the new estimate, however, is still vastly higher than we thought it could possibly be until the past couple of years—thanks to horizontal drilling and “fracking.”  The new U.S. Geological Service estimate is that the Marcellus Shale formation alone, which stretches down the mountains from New York to West Virginia, may hold 84 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas. It may be 141 trillion. The forecast in 2002 was virtually zero.

We’re also starting to tap the equally-important potential of the shale oil in the Bakken Formation under the Dakotas, Montana, and Alberta.

The environmentalists claim fracking threatens our drinking water. But thousands of feet of soil separate the fracking zones from the surface water tables. Moreover, the fracking liquids are 90 percent water, 9.5 percent sand, and half-a percent of mostly table salt and citric acid.

The phenomenon of shale is happening world-wide, especially in energy-short countries like Poland and China. Bachmann’s example would encourage Britain to keep its coal-fired generators, rather than suffering long, needless EU-imposed rolling blackouts.

Would a Bachmann administration actually see gasoline at $2 per gallon?  I doubt it. Especially since such policies would also stimulate the overall economy, boosting economic growth, stock values, employment, and gasoline demand. But nobody would care about the “failed” promise. She—or any other likely GOP candidate—would have cut real energy costs and shifted the nation from despair to enthusiasm.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Back during the bad old Bush presidency, the eco-movement loudly endorsed ethanol, particularly cellulosic ethanol, as a good eco-substitute for gasoline. Now they’ve changed their minds. They’re finally admitting that you can’t grow ethanol and food on the same acres. If you’re going to add ethanol to your shopping list, you need to clear more land to grow the feedstock. When forest or grassland is cleared and plowed, huge amounts of carbon stored in the soil gas off into the air. If Global Warming is man-made, this is a serious problem.

 

This gem of newfound wisdom has just been published in the October 23 issue of Science, and dutifully repeated by the Washington Post and the other Green media collaborators. The lead author is Princeton’s Tim Searchinger, formerly a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund.

 

Where were these “environmentalists” when Bush and the Congress installed their ill-considered mandates for corn and cellulosic ethanol? Three full years ago, I did a study with the Competitive Enterprise Institute titled Biofuels, Food or Wildlife:  The Massive Land Costs of U.S. Ethanol. I warned back then that making any useful amount of ethanol would force us to plow millions more acres of wildlands—first for corn and then for poplar, pine, and other fast-growing trees to make wood chips for cellulosic ethanol.

 

I warned there wasn’t enough land to go around. Nobody cared; because the Greens approved it. But the Greens are playing bait-n-switch. First it was solar, but the sun only shines for half of each 24 hours. Clouds interrupt too. How can we keep the lights on at the school and the hospital? 

 

Then it was wind turbines. But a big EU power provider has testified that wind is so erratic you need 90 percent of your installed wind capacity matched in “spinning reserve”—burning fuel—from fossil or nuclear. Why bother to make the wind turbines at all? 

 

Corn ethanol nearly doubled world food prices in three years, and is set to do it again whenever there’s a short corn crop. Cellulosic ethanol is still unworkable and the environmentalists are now telling us not to bother.

 

They don’t want us to have energy! Paul Ehrlich and Maurice Strong—the Canadian “grey eminence” of the UN—agree that the threat to the earth is “too many rich people.” And energy is the key to the affluence. So we must tax away the energy.

 

What about more nuclear plants that don’t emit CO₂?  The Obama administration won’t allow spent nuclear fuel to be stored at Harry Reid’s Yucca Mountain, and it won’t permit reprocessing. Strike it off the list!

 

Now we learn that the energy-tax bills currently in the Congress contain a little clause that lets the White House renege on all those emission permits the big companies have sold their souls for—if CO₂ levels go too high. That’s not temperatures too high, but CO2 levels in the atmosphere too high. So what if CO₂ has almost no linkage to our temperatures? As the oceans recover from their Little Ice Age chill, the laws of physics guarantee higher and higher CO₂ concentrations in the air. Talk about legislative sleight-of-hand! 

 

Again I will warn the Green movement:  If children are starving for lack of nitrogen fertilizer for the crops (made with natural gas); if elderly voters are literally freezing to death in their homes for lack of coal; those laws won’t be worth the paper they were drafted on (considerable as the paper piles already are).

 

In fact, the Congress itself will race to change the laws before you can say “tea party.” 

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net