Hartnett White Kathleen - Fueling freedom: exposing the mad war on energy

Copyright 2016 by Stephen Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White

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First e-book edition, 2016: ISBN 978-1-62157-438-5

Originally published in hardcover, 2016

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To my new wife, Anne, who is my personal unrelenting source of energy.

Stephen Moore

In honor of and in appreciation for my late parents, Mary Clare and Andrew Stone Hartnett.

Kathleen Hartnett White

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

I n this book, you will learn why most of what you think you know about energyand what our kids are being taught about energyis flat-out wrong. In one of the great ironies of history, a frantic global movement to eliminate fossil fuelsthe foundation of modern lifehas achieved comprehensive power throughout the developed world at the very moment when the supply of those resources, especially in the United States, has exploded. Here are some of the astonishing facts about Americas bountiful energy future:

America has more recoverable energy supplies than any nationby far. We have more oil and natural gas than Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, China, and all of the OPEC nations combined.

Thanks to the shale oil and gas revolution, America will never run out of energy. We have hundreds of years worth of oil, natural gas, and coalwith existing technologies.

The revolutionary drilling technologies pioneered here in Americaincluding horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturinghave more than doubled recoverable U.S. energy supplies. Contrary to false reports in the media, virtually no documented environmental problems have been associated with frackingever.

By the year 2020 the United States can be energy independent for the first time in half a century. With the pro-America energy policy outlined in this book, America will be the dominant energy producer in the world, and OPEC will be brought to its knees.

At least fifty trillion dollars worth of recoverable energythe greatest storehouse of treasure in historylies beneath federal lands and federal water. Drilling for these resources will create millions of new American jobs and could increase the growth rate of GDP from 2 percent to 4 percent or more.

The federal government will collect three to ten trillion dollars in royalties from oil, natural gas, and coal resources over the next thirty years. Producing American energy is the single best means of balancing the federal budget, eliminating our trade deficit, and retiring our nineteen-trillion-dollar national debt.

Wind and solar powerso-called green energyare niche energy sources that meet less than 3 percent of our needs, even with hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies. President Obamas own Energy Department admits that even if we continue those enormous subsidies, less than 10 percent of our energy will come from wind and solar by 2030. We will be highly reliant on fossil fuels for at least the next several decades.

Power Up

A powerful summer storm swept through Northern Virginia a few years ago, leaving more than a million homes without electric power for days. One of those homes belonged to the Moore family. The sweltering July temperature hovered around a hundred degrees, and it was so humid you felt like you needed gills to breathe.

Sure, were miserable, Steve joked to his three children, but look at the bright side. Think how much weve reduced our carbon footprint! Consider it a life lesson in what it means to live green. They saw no humor in that. Without Facebook, ESPN, and air conditioning, they felt like they had surrendered their basic human rights.

One night the family all sat on the couch, sweating and talking. At first, it had been a rustic adventure. Grilling their food on the barbecue. Reading by candlelight. Playing flashlight tag inside the house. But the novelty wore off quickly. What did people do before the age of electricity? one of the kids asked. I would have killed myself, he moaned, only half joking.

Electrical power is the central nervous system of our modern economy and our twenty-first-century lifestyles, and living without it for a few days is a reminder of how vulnerable we are to being sent back to a pre-industrial age. Yet every initiative of the so-called green movement is intended to reduce our access to electrical poweralthough they never admit that explicitly.

The power outage that gave the Moore family a new appreciation for the electricity that powers our lives was caused by Mother Nature. But we are convinced that rolling brownouts are comingespecially in states like California, which are trying to rely on unreliable green energy sourcesthanks to the radical environmentalists who have achieved a choke-hold on our politics.

Green groups, for example, have declared war on coal, which still produces nearly 40 percent of our electricity. The Obama administration is listening and has slammed the brakes on coal production. Technological progress is making this cheap and domestically abundant energy source cleaner all the time. Yet the global-warming alarmist James Hansen, a scientist at NASA, has compared the railroad cars carrying coal across our country to the death trains that transported Jews to Nazi concentration camps.

Natural gas is our second major source of electrical energy. The technological miracle of hydraulic fracturingfrackinghas given us hundreds of years worth of this clean-burning fuel that reduces greenhouse gas emissions. But the Sierra Club is vowing to shut down natural gas too. Regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency against methane (natural gas) could seriously impair our use of natural gas. The anti-fracking movement spreads (groundless) fear about contaminated water, but as the Moore family discovered, when you lose electricity you often lose access to potable water.

Of course, Big Green hates oil and nuclear power too. Thats why were not drilling for oil in many parts of Alaska or on other energy-rich federal lands and waters and why were not building the Keystone XL pipeline. This is public policy that is not just anti-growth but dangerous to our health and safety.

Sadly, schoolchildren are the target of propaganda about saving the planet with alternative energy sources. If global warming is a threat, we will be saved not by building windmills or riding our bicycles to work, but by applying advanced technology and