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SEIFFE:  Why Environmentalists Won't Let Us Drill

Friday, May 23, 2008

By Ralf Seiffe

Demand for petroleum is rapidly and permanently escalating and gas prices are transmitting this historical event at every fill-up.  Prices have risen beyond mere pain.  Now above $4, they threaten American confidence in our living standards yet our representatives vote to exacerbate these effects.  Democrats in Congress have just voted to keep limits on domestic exploration and drilling, thereby securing U.S. markets for the world’s oil tyrants.  At the same time, the Illinois General Assembly has inflicted its own form of tyranny by sustaining the nation’s most complex and highest-priced gas tax system.  What would explain the reasons our politicians would vote these self-inflicted wounds?  The answer is that the Left has recognized oil shock as an unprecedented, but explainable, opportunity to press their long-term agenda. 

More than a century ago, Émile Durkheim, the French social scientist investigating societal dynamics, developed the concept of anomie.  This notion holds that rapid changes in economic conditions and social values results in a breakdown of cultural mores and interpersonal relationships.  Described as normlessness, Durkheim concluded this condition leads individuals to make choices that are irrational and not in the individual’s best interests.  Others have applied this thought to nations, finding that rapidly changing conditions bring dangers to cultural integrity and so produce bad public decisions.  Brought forward one hundred years, this idea of anomie may help explain some of the horrible decisions American leaders are making. 

From many viewpoints, public policies developed over the last generation appear to threaten the long-term coherence of American society.  Just a few of these policies include the post-war welfare system, the systematic debasing of the dollar, the unsustainable promises of benefits made long into the future, an educational monopoly which is depressing future living standards and most recently, socializing sub-prime mortgage losses for both borrowers and lenders. 

Add to this rising foreign economies that will certainly overtake ours.  Then, there is the growing threat of Islamo-fascism and its complement, the erosion of western values in Europe.  Moreover, nations in the Western Hemisphere, which showed real promise a generation ago, are slowly moving towards Marxism.  These rapidly accumulating challenges cause such anxiety to the American public and its representatives that followers of Durkheim would observe that the U.S. is suffering from cultural anomie.  From that, they would conclude that conditions are ripe for the nation to act outside its best interests. 

Nowhere is this effect more obvious than in our energy policy.  Ours is a nation that runs on power yet we’ve permitted special interests to eliminate almost every opportunity to create more of what moves America.  Whether it’s drilling in a tiny patch in a mostly dark part of Alaska, beating the Chinese to the petroleum reserves close to our coasts, converting coal to liquid fuel or restoring the nuclear option, we have allowed so-called environmentalists to eliminate all of our energy opportunities.  By foreclosing each and every energy source--even benign windmills--our future dims as much as those replacement florescent bulbs dim our homes.

Presumably, those who make it their business to limit our energy options are just as affected--and just as mad--as the rest of us paying more than four dollars for gasoline.  Certainly, these environmentalists must realize that those drilling platforms they detest actually promote aquatic life and a storm of Katrina’s power couldn't cause a single drop of oil to spill from the rigs.  They must know that no one has died from American nuclear power operations while coal fired generators are broad spectrum killers claiming miners who dig the coal to asthmatics who breath the soot these plants spew.

Despite this overwhelming evidence, a significant slice of Americans remain adamantly opposed to any expanded domestic, energy production.  Sustaining their position means the tacit acceptance of a host of malignant side effects which include the petrol-dollar funding of regimes dedicated or our national destruction, the near certainty of a future supertanker disaster that would be obviated by a cross-Alaska pipeline and the loss of those collateral benefits that energy technology research and development would likely discover. 

The low risks and the certain economic benefit more domestic energy production contrasts against the evident disadvantages of paying Putin, Chavez and other thugs.  It must be as obvious to the environmentalists as it is to the rest of us.  Still, they persist in a path that is certain to result in more planetary damage, expanded financing for terrorism and continued pressure on the dollar’s value.  They must also recognize that Americans are far more concerned--and successful--in controlling environmental damage in projects we design and operate than anyone else.  They must know that the risks of increased domestic production are far less dangerous than the precarious position in which their non-negotiable, policies of energy dependency have placed us. 

Nevertheless, they will not be dissuaded from their irrational position.  Normally, such unreasonable attitudes cannot survive in either the short or long term; that this one does survive signals that its advocates must believe there are sensible reasons for energy prohibition. 

Perhaps it’s not the physical environment with which these “Greens” are most concerned.  Instead, perhaps, they want a different political environment in which emboldened terrorists, tinhorn dictators and the Chinese Military/Export juggernaut are favored components.  These all challenge American prestige and tend to diminish American wealth.  By using “environmentalism” as the cover to insist that we send money out of the country to obtain the energy we need, we do nothing but strengthen these challengers. If we continue, these rivals will overtake us in the near future.

Perhaps, those advocating energy dependence and their political allies see this as a good thing.  They may see energy as the best hope for achieving a much larger objective.

Some more history helps explain why. The environmentalist’s intellectual ancestors are the socialists who, since the end of the Great War, have clamored for some form of World Government.  In their utopian vision, they long for some benevolent central power, believing it to be superior to national forms of government.  These thinkers established The League of Nations to begin that process but it failed, largely because the United States rejected membership.  After the Second World War, the ghost of Woodrow Wilson and the personality of Eleanor Roosevelt reconstituted the effort in the form of the United Nations.  While the environmentalist’s intellectual forefathers were able to establish the organizational means to create a post-nationalistic world, they have not been able to impose it. 

Since World War II, they’ve failed because the United States freedom and resulting economic power has provided a powerful and effective contra-example to any other alternative.  We’ve been able to show the rest of the world that ours was a better way to live. 

This means the utopians who dream of a socialized planet in which the U.S. is a mere 5% component, must first overcome the 60-year obstruction the U.S. has been to their plans.  This requires a new, indirect, strategy that lessens our strength and prestige.  They’ve come to understand that feeding our energy addiction with $130 oil will create an unprecedented normlessness that cutting consumption inflicts on an energy-intense society.  By bleeding the U.S. economy with sky-high energy prices--and prohibiting any domestic alternative--they must believe they can rot us out faster than crystal meth destroys its victims.  Socialists--masquerading as environmentalists--see prohibitions on domestic energy production as the means to achieve their much larger, long-term goal.  In that context, their motivations become understandable and congruent. 

American leaders' recent words and deeds are so foolish that they support the notion that our politicians must have some agenda other than solving the oil crisis.  Barack Obama’s crackpot admonition that the world will not tolerate U.S. homes at 72 degree nor will they permit Americans to drive pick-up trucks.  The Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating supposed collusion of the oil companies but will not permit discussion of new drilling.  The House has approved a bill to subject OPEC to anti-trust statutes.  This self-destructive behavior is beyond even the power of Ayn Rand to imagine or describe and are the kind of bad decisions that cultural anomie would predict.
   
For Americans trying to understand why their leaders are acting in ways that seem utterly contrary to the national interest, Durkheim’s notion of anomie may help.  In that state, rapidly changing social and economic developments create conditions in which we are susceptible to expedient, but ultimately bad decisions.  Committed socialists understand this process and are using the oil shock as one method to further their long advocated, but unaccomplished, worldview.   

Ralf Seiffe advises business start-ups and product launches from Chicago, Illinois and is a political analyst and columnist for the Illinois Leader and Illinois Review.

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