Bringin' the Heat

"There's no such thing as "sustainable" development. Human progress and individual liberty have advanced on the backs of one unsustainable development after another: When we needed trees for heating and transportation, we chopped 'em down. Then we discovered oil, and the trees grew back. When the oil runs out, we won't notice because our SUVs will be powered by something else. Bet on human ingenuity every time. We're not animals, and it's a cult as deranged as the screwiest fringe religion to insist we are. Earth's most valuable resource is us."--Mark Steyn, 'The Masses Have Amassed Too Much'

Stephen Moore:

"The shale gas revolution lowered the price of natural gas by about two-thirds (from $10 to $3 per million cubic feet). This, in turn, has meant big savings in electricity and home heating costs from where they were a decade ago. We calculated the benefits to poor households from these lower prices and estimated that shale gas results in $10 billion in consumer savings each year. The annual budget for the LIHEAP program is about $3 billion. So shale gas is saving poor families three times what LIHEAP does. ...

Home heating and electric bills would be much cheaper still for poor families without the so-called renewable-energy standards pushed by greens and liberal politicians at the state and local levels. The Manhattan Institute has found that states with these wind and solar mandates have had much larger hikes in utility costs than states without them. New York, which is revving up its green energy policies, charges its residents 40 percent more for electric power than the national average. ...

How can a nation with massive deposits of very cheap natural gas -- such as the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and West Virginia -- be importing natural gas?

One reason is that we don't have pipelines to inexpensively transport the natural gas to the Northeast. Environmentalists who hate oil and gas have spent years blocking this vital infrastructure -- not just the Keystone Pipeline but also many other pipelines that should be transporting shale oil and gas efficiently across the country. It doesn't seem to bother the green groups that the biggest victims of anti-fossil fuel policies are low- and middle-income Americans. Never has.

Environmentalism is effectively a regressive tax on America's poorest households, imposed upon them by liberal politicians and the rich liberals who fund them, such as Democratic donor-extraordinaire Tom Steyer.".......

Eartha First!