Congress To Reduce Gas Prices

Oh, wait, no...

Declaring a new direction in energy policy, the House on Saturday approved $16 billion in taxes on oil companies, while providing billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives for renewable energy and conservation efforts.

So, the Democratic Congress admits that it understands that tax breaks and cash incentives will encourage growth and reduce costs for an industry, but simultaneously...

Republican opponents said the legislation ignored the need to produce more domestic oil, natural gas and coal. One GOP lawmaker bemoaned "the pure venom ... against the oil and gas industry."

Yes, and also the need to improve our actual gasoline refining infrastructure, part of which, as we've seen before, is a result of the relatively poor profit margins in the industry. With prices at a high, rather than finding an opportunity to encourage development, Congressional Democrats have decided to simply take the improving margins away from the industry, thereby removing any incentive they might have to push forward, and instead attempting to strongarm the development of unproven and often unfeasible "alternative" technologies that, I can assure you, none of the people voting for this bill understand in the least, short of the subsidies it will enable them to hand to failing "technology companies" in their districts.

"We are turning to the future," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi... "It's about our children, about our future, the world in which they live."

Do it for the children, children who will grow up to pay $8.25 a gallon for gasoline, while the Democrats sooth them with another few decades of sweet lies about cars that run on corn being just around the corner, if only they tax the oil industry just a little more.

The Manhattan Project worked because the underlying principles of the end product were correct. You could throw money at it, because it was a sound idea and the obstacle was a lack of manhours. So-called "alternative energy" isn't being obstructed by a lack of interest, it's being obstructed by the laws of physics and the limits of available technology. Hydrogen fuel cells face massive logistical hurdles for the foreseeable future, and even wind power, while potentially useful as a supplemental energy source for the electrical grid, simply must have backup sources of reliable energy, and wind farms suffer one of the the same fundamental problems as oil refineries: Nobody, not Democrats, Canadians, conservationists, Texans, neither Scots nor English want the things anywhere near their homes or great outdoors.

At this time, fossil fuels and nuclear energy are what work, and if Congress is going to be involved, they should be working to solve the problems associated with that, not "investing" billions of dollars of other people's money to prop up companies dabbling in iffy technologies that you can safely bet will not see the light of day as mainstream solutions. They're legislators, not engineers, and we're all being taken for an elaborate ride.

Update: Congress, playing make-believe.