Victor David Hanson Washingtontimes.com
Shortly after the 2008
election, President Obama’s soon-to-be chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, infamously
declared, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.”
He elaborated: “What I
mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do
before.”
Disasters, such as the
September 2008 financial crisis, were thus seen as opportunities. Out of the
chaos, a shell-shocked public might at last be ready to accept more state
regulation of the economy and far greater deficit spending. Indeed, the
national debt doubled in the eight years following the 2008 crisis.
During the 2008
campaign, gas prices at one point averaged over $4 a gallon. Then-candidate
Barack Obama reacted by pushing a green agenda — as if the cash-strapped but
skeptical public could be pushed into alternative energy agendas.
Mr. Obama mocked
then-Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s prescient advice to
“drill, baby, drill” — as if Mrs. Palin’s endorsement of new technologies such
as fracking and horizontal drilling could never ensure consumers plentiful
fuel.
Instead, in September
2008, Steven Chu, who would go on to become Mr. Obama’s secretary of energy,
told The Wall Street Journal, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the
price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
In other words, if gas
prices were to reach $9 or $10 a gallon, angry Americans would at last be
forced to seek alternatives to their gas-powered cars, such as taking the bus
or using even higher-priced alternative fuels.
When up for re-election
in 2012, Mr. Obama doubled down on his belief that gas was destined to get
costlier: “And you know we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.”
Yet even as Mr. Obama
spoke, U.S. frackers were upping the supply and reducing the cost of gas —
despite efforts by the Obama administration to deny new oil drilling permits on
federal lands.
U.S oil production
roughly doubled from 2008 to 2015. And by 2017, the old bogeyman of “peak oil”
production had been put to rest, as the United States became nearly
self-sufficient in fossil fuel production.
Viewing the world in
apocalyptic terms was also useful during the California drought.
In March 2016, even as
the four-year drought was over and California precipitation had returned to
normal, Gov. Jerry Brown was still harping on the connection between “climate
change” and near-permanent drought.
“We are running out of
time because it’s not raining,” Mr. Brown melodramatically warned. “This is a
serious matter we’re experiencing in California, as kind of a foretaste.”
Foretaste to what,
exactly?
In 2017, it rained and
snowed even more than it had during a normal year of precipitation in 2016.
Currently, a drenched
California’s challenge is not theoretical global warming, but the more mundane
issue of long-neglected dam maintenance that threatens to undermine overfull
reservoirs.
Mr. Brown had seen the
drought as a means of achieving the aim of regimenting Californians to readjust
their lifestyles in ways deemed environmentally correct. The state refused to
begin work on new reservoirs, aqueducts and canals to be ready for the
inevitable end of the drought, even though in some 120 years of accurate record
keeping, California had likely never experienced more than a four-year
continuous drought.
And it did not this
time around, either.
Instead, state
officials saw the drought as useful to implement permanent water rationing, to
idle farm acreage, and to divert irrigation water to environmental agendas.
Well before this year’s
full spring snowmelt, more than 50 million acre-feet of water has already
cascaded out to sea (“liberated,” in green terms). The lost fresh water was
greater than the capacity of all existing (and now nearly full) man-made
reservoirs in the state, and its loss will make it harder to deal with the next
inevitable drought.
No matter: Progressive
narratives insisted that man-caused carbon releases prompted not only record
heat and drought, but within a few subsequent months also record coolness and
precipitation.
And in “Alice in Wonderland”
fashion, just as drilling was supposedly no cure for oil shortages, building
reservoirs was no remedy for water scarcity.
In the same manner,
neglecting the maintenance and building of roads in California created a
transportation crisis. Until recently, the preferred solution to the state’s
road mayhem and gridlock wasn’t more freeway construction but instead
high-speed rail — as if substandard streets and highways would force millions
of frustrated drivers to use expensive state-owned mass transit.
These days, shortages
of credit, water, oil or adequate roads are no longer seen as age-old
challenges to a tragic human existence. Instead of overcoming them with
courage, ingenuity, technology and scientific breakthroughs, they are seen as
existential “teachable moments.”
In other words, crises
are not all bad — if they lead the public to more progressive government.
No comments:
Post a Comment