The Smartest People in the Room

One of the fundamental failures of liberalism is the way liberal policies conflict with each other and nowhere is that conflict more apparent than when discussing energy.  Liberals worship the Earth as a god, they love clean, renewable energy like wind and solar and pond scum (Priest-King's latest favorite) because they want to avoid offending their god and there's a certain internal logic there, but it all falls apart when you start connecting one position to another.  Any third-grader will tell you that trying to force like magnetic poles together is an exercise in futility, but try telling that to a liberal: They can overcome Nature, don't you know.

For example, liberals love clean, inoffensive energy but they also say they want a prosperous economy, at least in the way they define prosperous:  Wealth is distributed equally from top to bottom, nobody has any more than anyone else and employment is concentrated in manufacturing and building trades, fields historically dominated by the Democrat Party but which also require abundant, reliable and relatively inexpensive sources of energy which from the Industrial Revolution onward have been drawn from oil and coal, the two greatest demons in the tree hugger's philosophy.  So the liberal attacks oil and coal, forbids drilling offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and the Alaska ANHWR (Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and former EPA Administrator Carol Browner were condemned by Federal courts in June and July 2012 for publishing a report that purposely distorted the views of a White House-appointed panel that opposed the Administration's moratorium on offshore drilling), forbids fracking that would extract more oil from existing wells (EPA Region VI Administrator Al Armendariz, in a speech in 2010, asserted that his enforcement policy toward oil and natural gas companies was comparable to the Romans' practice of crucifixion), stops construction of the Keystone pipeline (forcing the Canadians to sell their oil the Chinese, boosting their economy and not ours), imposes draconian fuel mileage standards on the automakers to kill production of the trucks, minivans and SUV's that Americans prefer, issues drastic clean air regulations designed to close coal-fired power plants that provide 40% of our electricity, presses for cap-in-trade legislation that would kill the coal industry entirely, and imposes stiff sales taxes on gasoline to discourage consumption (U.S. oil consumption has fallen over 1.6 million barrels per day from 2004-2010 but still not enough to satisfy the socialist one-worlders).  As if that were not enough, the liberals provide billions of dollars in Federal loan guarantees to the solar power industry, fully aware the American public has largely rejected solar power and that individual businesses are on shaky financial ground, then stand aside as Solyndra, Solar Trust and other companies go bankrupt.  They mandate the total replacement of incandescent light bulbs that have been the norm for over 125 years in favor of fluorescent bulbs that are more expensive and are the very devil to dispose of (the EPA recommends evacuating a room in which a CFL bulb breaks, airing it for 5-10 minutes, shutting off the home's central air system to avoid circulating poisoned air and removing any debris outside).  Still not finished, the liberals pour billions into electric cars, hoping that the love that the white, affluent, environmentally-conscious elite have for their toys transfers to the general public, then scratch their heads when the Chevy Volt, Fisker Tesla and Nissan Leaf either fail to sell or are so prone to mechanical failure that production is halted.  (The Tesla apparently turns into a "brick" if the battery drains, such that it must be returned to the factory for a total overhaul.)  The net effect is an economy that struggles to grow, deprived of the energy it needs, and the strangling of the very industries that the liberals claim to champion, and this paradox never occurs to the liberals nor to the unions who traditionally throw their support behind them, proof that liberal energy policies can never succeed because they literally cancel each other out.

What about gasoline prices?  Liberals always complain that the rising price of gasoline unfairly affects the poor and middle class and that the oil companies are gouging the public, but they never offer to reduce or eliminate the heavy taxes they attach to the sale of gasoline, or reduce the heavy regulations that throttle the construction of new refineries, or remove restrictions on new drilling, or do anything that would increase supply, lower demand and therefore prices.  Priest-King blocked the Keystone Pipeline that would have increased trade with a friendly country and reduced our dependency on Middle East oil while he flatly stated that "we can't simply drill our way out of this problem, " when in fact we could if he would only get out of the way.  In ten years' time, we would have tapped enough of our own reserves (and Canada's) that we could indeed reduce gasoline prices, create new jobs, boost our economy, cut our foreign oil imports and bolster our national security, but these benefits are all secondary to the desire to revert to a horse-drawn, agrarian, pre-industrial economy that would be at one with Nature and which, of course, would be completely inadequate to sustain a nation of 310 million people.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/15/despite-stimulus-funding-solyndra-and-4-other-companies-have-hit-rock-bottom/
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/02/us-solartrust-bankruptcy-idUSBRE8310ZV20120402
Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/297070/epa-expands-its-mission-crucifixion-charles-c-w-cooke
Source: http://www.epa.gov/cfl/cflcleanup.html