The State of the Union Address (SOTUA) is history. I've paid attention to the coverage and not heard anyone address this one line from the speech:


It sounds innocent enough. No one wants "waste"especially not wasted energy. To understand the impact of the statement, you have to read the supporting document released coincidentally with the SOTUA: The President's Plan for A Strong Middle Class & A Strong America. Within it, we find the following: "doubling American energy productivity by 2030, starting with a new Energy Efficiency Race to the Top for states: The President is laying out a bold but achievable goal to slash energy waste through increased efficiency."

This whole energy efficiency idea came from the Energy 2030 report recently released by the Alliance Commission on National Energy Efficiency Policy. The idea is that "energy productivity, or the amount of economic output possible at a given level of energy supply, increases as does efficiency, thereby allowing us to do more with less energy." Kateri Callahan, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, which spearheaded Energy 2030, said the following in response to Obama's inclusion of their ideas: "We very much welcome that the administration embraced some of the recommendations."

Addressing the line in question, energy writer Elisa Wood said : "It will take some serious work to achieve the goal.



Again, efficiency, on its own, is a laudable goal. The inclusion of this comment in the SOTUA aligns with Obama's ideology of pushing less energy usage. This is troubling because it is widely accepted that energy consumption and economic growth go hand-in-hand. A successful country uses more energy. For example, one of the reasons the US is using less gasoline is that so many people are unemployed. They are not driving to and from work every day. They are not taking long driving vacations. They are hunkered down. Heavy manufacturing requires abundant, available, and affordable energy. Energy is one of manufacturing's biggest expenses. But because of closed factories, we are actually using less electricity in the industrial sector than we did in 2000.

If the President truly wants to bring manufacturing back to America, as he claims, instead of pushing for less energy use, he should be working to make available as much low-cost energy as possible. But he is pushing for more "clean energy"which is also many times more expensive, as Americans are beginning to see on their utility bills.

The problem with the whole "efficiency" argument can be found, in part, in Wood's comment: it will "cost hundreds of billions of dollars."

News flash! We are in the worst economic crisis of most of our lifetimes. We have a spending problem. We do not have an energy problemespecially not an electricity problem (and the Energy 2030 report focuses primarily on electricity). Within our borders, we have enough coal, natural gas, and uranium (to fuel nuclear power plants) to power a strong, growing American economy for 300 years. Instead of promoting our abundant fuels, our president is ideologically bound to promoting energy that is inefficient, ineffective and uneconomicalwhile threatening our best competitive advantage in the global marketplace: low-cost energy.

If what I am positing here is incorrect, the Keystone pipeline would be approved (I do not think it will bebut I hope I am wrong); the EPA would be directed to dial back on the threat of a fracking banallowing the states to manage their own regulations, as they currently do; liquefied natural gas export terminals would be approved; modern super critical coal-fueled power plants would be built and older plants, that are burning so much cleaner today than they were 40 years ago, would be allowed to live out their productive lives instead of being shut down prematurely; nuclear power plants would be built where they are the best choice; new refineries would be permittedreplacing the high-maintenance Rube-Goldberg contraptions; federal lands would be opened up for access to our oil and natural gas resources that can be extracted with precision; the endangered species act wouldn't be used to block energy development; and so-called "investments" in expensive green energythat line the pockets of the President's friendswould be curtailed (after all, we do already know how to make electricity from the wind and the sun, if we ever really need it, and we can take the technology off the shelf and implement it); and the economy would be booming la North Dakota.

Sadly, America is heading the other direction. What would the United States look like in a reduced energy environment? Just ask the passengers of the cruise ship Triumph who had to sleep outdoors in a makeshift tent city because there wasn't electricity for air conditioning, who ate raw food because there was no way to cook it, and who had to use plastic bags as toilets because there was no way to process the waste. A life without energy is no triumphit is a tragedy.
