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Yesterday’s opening items on oil being one of the greenest of fuels get a follow-on today by Robert Samuelson.
… Unless we shut down the economy, we need fossil fuels. More efficient light bulbs, energy-saving appliances, cars with higher gas mileage may all dampen energy use. But offsetting these savings will be more people (391 million vs. 305 million), more households (147 million vs. 113 million), more vehicles (297 million vs. 231 million) and a bigger economy (almost double in size). Although wind, solar and biomass are assumed to grow as much as 10 times faster than overall energy use, they provide only 11 percent of supply in 2035, up from 5 percent in 2008.
There are physical limits on new energy sources, as Robert Bryce shows in his book “Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.” Suppose an inventor “found a way to convert soybeans into jet fuel,” Bryce writes. “Even with that invention, the conversion of all of America’s yearly soybean production into jet fuel would only provide about 20 percent of U.S. jet fuel demand.” Jet fuel, in turn, is about 8 percent of U.S. oil use. Similarly, wind turbines have limited potential; they must be supported by backup generating capacity when there’s no breeze.
The consequences of the BP oil spill come in two parts. The first is familiar: the fire; the deaths; coated birds; polluted wetlands; closed beaches; anxious fishermen. The second is less appreciated: a more muddled energy debate.
Obama has made vilification of oil and the oil industry a rhetorical mainstay. This is intellectually shallow, if politically understandable. …
Mark Steyn outlines the problems associated with an Iranian bomb.
The other day, noting Bret Stephens’s analysis in Commentary as to why Iran cannot be contained, Jonah Goldberg made a very shrewd throwaway aside: “Arguments like this tend to get ignored not because they aren’t persuasive, but because they are,” he said. “The political and psychological costs of accepting the premise are too high. So, denial inevitably triumphs.”
And thus our Iran “policy”: There will be no U.S. military strike. There will be no international sanctions regime. The mullahs will go nuclear, because letting them go nuclear requires least of us — and there will always be scholars and experts ready to justify our inertia as farsighted realpolitik. Hence the rehabilitation of “containment”: That we can do. Iran, says Zbigniew Brzezinski, “may be dangerous, assertive, and duplicitous, but there is nothing in their history to suggest they are suicidal.”
Mr. Brzezinski is a man who has been reliably wrong about everything that matters for decades. His decision to route American support for the Afghan resistance through the malign double act of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki and Pakistan’s ISI has had consequences we live with to this day. He is the master of unrealpolitik, and so naturally his is now the new conventional wisdom: Iran is not “suicidal”; therefore, it can be contained.
Even a non-suicidal Iran is presumably intending to derive some benefit from its nuclear status. Entirely rational leverage would include: controlling the supply of Gulf oil, setting the price, and determining the customers; getting vulnerable emirates such as Kuwait and Qatar to close U.S. military bases; and turning American allies in Europe into de facto members of the non-aligned movement. Whatever deterrent effect it might have on first use or proliferation, there is no reason to believe any “containment” strategy would prevent Iran’s accomplishing its broader strategic goals. …
The threats that Israel is facing are changing and increasing, writes Caroline Glick.
…First, it is a model that can be and in all likelihood will be replicated on air and land and it can be replicated anywhere. Israel can and should expect mobs of suicide protesters marching on Gaza to force Israel to surrender control over its borders. Israel can expect mobs of suicide protesters marching on Israeli embassies and other government installations around the world in an attempt to increase its diplomatic isolation.
In the air, Israel can expect charter flights to take off from airports around the world with a few dozen kamikaze protesters who will force the IAF to shoot them down as they approach Israeli airspace. …
…THE SECOND and far more dangerous implication of Israel’s enemies’ aggressive adoption of suicide protests is that by ensuring violence will be used, they increase the chances of war. …
In Forbes, John Tamny tells us why the Dow has gone from 10,000 to 10,000 in 11 years.
The Dow Jones industrial average first touched 10,000 on March 16, 1999. Eleven years later the Dow remains stuck around the same 10,000 level.
…Market commentators will apply all manner of reasoning and faulty to logic to the stuck nature of stocks, but the answers necessary to explain the past and present are really quite simple: bad policy.
To see why, it’s worth remembering that there’s really no mystery to positive market returns. The inputs necessary are simple, and boil down to four things: when taxes are light, regulation is nonintrusive, trade is free and money values stable, stocks do well. Any diversion from those four inputs leads to market uncertainty and reduced returns, or considering 1966-1982 and 1999 to the present, no gains at all. …
Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe, tells us to listen to the ideologues that Obama appoints to find out the president’s true views.
PRESIDENT BARACK Obama was adamant… “I don’t believe that government can or should run health care.’’
But if Obama is as opposed to a government-ruled health sector as he claims, why has he nominated Dr. Donald Berwick as director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services — far and away the nation’s largest health-insurance programs, at a cost of nearly $1 trillion — a man who openly adores Britain’s socialized health care?
“I am romantic about the National Health Service,’’ Berwick told a British audience in 2008. “I love it.’’ He not only loves the National Health Service, he extols it as “an example for the whole world — an example . . . that the United States needs now.’’
…And he embraces government health care rationing. “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care,’’ he said in a 2009 interview, “the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.’’ This is a view Berwick has held for a long time; more than 10 years ago he wrote that “limited resources require decisions about who will have access to care and the extent of their coverage.’’ … “Here, you choose a harder path,’’ he said in Britain two years ago. “You plan the supply; you aim a bit low; you prefer slightly too little of a technology or a service to too much; then you search for care bottlenecks and try to relieve them.’’…