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By Ben Stein
Spectator.org
There was a staggeringly important article on the front page of the Wall
Street Journal on Tuesday. Briefly, it said that the immense run up in oil
prices in 2008, from roughly $33 a barrel to roughly $150 per barrel was not
caused by an oil shortage, was not caused by an immense upsurge in
demand from China and India and Brazil, not caused by bandits in
Nigeria.
This finding was from President Obama's Commodity Futures Trading Commission,
hardly a mouthpiece of Big Oil.
The staggering 2008 run up in price, which beggared hundreds of millions of
people throughout the world, was caused by the sinister machinations of a few
dozen oil traders and speculators in the commodity pits and lush offices of
hedge funds and investment banks. (Think Goldman, Sachs at its worst.) The
shortage, which terrified innocent people and literally killed the U.S.
automotive industry, made a few dozen or maybe a few hundred people very rich.
It also made the nation believe we actually faced a major oil shortage. (I was
briefly taken in before I realized that nothing in the supply demand situation
had changed even remotely enough to justify the kind of price moon shot we had
been through. When I wrote that the spike was the work of some oil speculators
and I knew their names, one of them sent me threatening e-mails.)
This belief -- that we faced an impending end of the supply of oil -- was a
huge part of the motivation to turn to "green power" sources like wind and
solar, to look for ways, even quite radical ways, to control energy use. This
totally fraudulent "fact" of rapidly depleting oil resources helped Mr. Barack
Obama get elected and is now helping him get his radical cap and trade and
energy control bill through Congress. This bill, largely turning U.S. energy
production and use upside down and saddling the nation with innumerable
regulations -- down to small details like having federal regulators mark up or
down every home up for resale based on every usage -- was based upon a fraud.
Now what? Will someone wake the heck up and say that Mr. Obama is putting
through his massive agenda of control in the energy sector based on a hoax? Will
Mr. Obama say he's re-thinking the whole scheme?
If there is no urgent or even semi-urgent need to control oil use (or natural
gas usage, since natural gas is now in staggering oversupply), why reorganize an
American energy industry that works extremely well already?
Will anyone in the administration get up on his hind legs and tell the truth:
the Obama energy plan is based on a "fact" that is now shown to be a fiction?
And will anyone have the guts to call the whole nightmare of regulation off?
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