We must move in a new direction. We are ripe for economic growth and energy independence if we responsibly tap the resources that God created right underfoot on American soil. Just as important, we have more desire and ability to protect the environment than any foreign nation from which we purchase energy today.In other words, Drill Baby, Drill!
Cap and trade has been discussed on both sides of the aisle for years. Obama's choice wouldn't be my choice, as it creates incentives for polluters to keep on polluting. No, the real choice for me is more along the lines of letting fossil fuel prices go up so that we use less. Last year when gas prices were nearly $5 a gallon, we sure used a lot less, didn't we?
One way we can do this is to take a hard look at the $800 billion or so Obama wants to spend on cap-and-trade. Last week I read a piece by Bjorn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. In it, he wrote that we should be spending far more on research and development than on a system that will only reduce the global temperature by 0.3 degrees by the end of the century. The amount of money that will be spent on R&D for new technologies that will mean less use of fossil fuels will mean that we will use more fossil fuels early on, but later will see a much longer term result in mean global temperature. Simply going cold turkey is unwise, he wrote, because there are no viable alternatives ready to take oil's place. Obama campaigned on this issue, and it's rather disconcerting to see him move away from it to keep some anti-environment members of Congress quiet.
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