President Obama used his first televised speech from the Oval Office, ostensibly on the topic of the BP oil spill, to run through his usual speech-making checklist, which includes blaming Bush and beating up on idealogical straw-men, like his long ago debunked contention that there was significant “deregulation” during the previous decade. He also continued his pattern of declaring every problem to be unprecedented, though he’s also undermined that same argument by making a bizarre comparison between the spill and 9/11.
The heart of his speech, however, was no doubt inspired by Rahm Emanual’s famous, or infamous, exhortation to let no good crisis go to waste. As such, Obama thinks the oil spill is a perfect time to revive his job killing, economy destroying cap-and-trade bill, though he dared not call it that.
The President seems to think that all we need to “end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels” is more government directed spending on “clean energy.” Jimmy Carter had the same idea. It went nowhere. We’ve spent billions on ethanol, and gotten nothing in return but higher food prices (and greater levels of starvation throughout the developing world).
The reason these past efforts failed is simple. Among other things, the government has no way to know what technology to back. Thankfully, we don’t need it to. The market provides more than enough incentive to develop new technologies. Technological developments in a wide variety of industries and fields are occurring every day without a single dime of government funding. As oil consumption rises and prices continue to increase over time, incentives to invest in research will only grow stronger. No wasteful, economy-killing central planning is necessary.
The other dirty little secret is that it’s ultimately existing industry that is able to capture these governmental efforts and direct benefits toward themselves. This is why companies like Shell, Conoco and BP have endorsed the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill. If President Obama is really serious about punishing BP, he should start by trashing the very legislation for which BP has been a strong proponent, and even had a hand in crafting.
