Nearly every politician, environmentalist and influential American claims to want to create American jobs, protect our homeland, preserve the environment and become energy-independent. Yet nearly every action our government takes, usually with the support of key groups, produces just the opposite results.
In fact, these stated objectives are impossible to achieve in an ever-worsening atmosphere of regulation. You see, we’re not in a cyclical recession that will end. We aren’t going to wake up one morning and suddenly be in an economic boom. We’re not going to make even a dent in our foreign energy dependence.
Excessive regulations and decisions based on emotion and politics instead of reality are perpetuating what I refer to as a “reg-cession.” The so-called stimulus packages and bailouts may provide an occasional sugar high for the economy, but the reg-cession will continue.
The depths of our energy dependence were first made apparent to most Americans in 1979 when we faced both the Iranian hostage crisis and the long lines at gasoline stations. Politicians were jolted to action. President Carter rushed to the television cameras in his cardigan sweater and pleaded with Americans to lower their thermostats, drive less, and drive slower.
This request for conservation was about as successful as the rest of Carter’s term. The president had good intentions, but Americans have repeatedly made it clear that they view abundant, affordable energy as a basic and essential. Finding more energy to fuel a growing economy, not using less to maintain a stagnant one, has been our shared goal.
What Americans got out of the energy shortage of the late 1970s was a 107,000-person U.S. Department of Energy. I’m not sure what 107,000 people at the Energy Department do but clearly they have not lessened our dependency on foreign energy.
Instead of energy independence, the government has worked for 30 years to create a nightmare world of regulations for domestic energy producers.
Activists helped achieve this bureaucratic shutdown by exploiting isolated incidents like the wreck of the Exxon Valdez in 1989 and the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979.
But it wasn’t until the superstitious belief in global warming became widely accepted that environmental radicals were able to achieve a sustained, emotional response by ill-informed and self-serving politicians.
The result has been regulations that strangle domestic energy production, endanger our homeland, handicap our economy, destroy jobs, and pollute the atmosphere.
Energy that should be properly produced and used in America is instead produced and used predominantly in Asia. Not only energy but also basic products once made in America are now imported from across the Pacific, where there is little meaningful environmental stewardship.
Consider just mercury emissions — this year Chinese facilities will emit 1,000 times more of the toxic substance than every plant in America.
Politicians and environmentalists in America profess concern for the world’s environment.
Instead, these elitists are hurting America and its workers and increasing worldwide pollution based on the reflexive acceptance of the junk science about global warming and an ignorance of how energy and markets really work.
They are feverishly fueling the worsening reg-cession.
But the crumbling American economy isn’t the result of just ill-founded U.S. environmental laws. Equally ill-founded safety and employment rules play their parts too.
Politicians who respond to occasional mining accidents with new laws usually lessen miner safety. Industry leaders are often more afraid of government retaliation than they are of more mining accidents, so they play along.
The cost of American energy unnecessarily increases while the safety of miners does not.
Millions of energy industry dollars are spent complying with safety laws that at best deal with preventing accidents that might occur once in 100 years while miners are exposed daily to fully avoidable risks. Politicians successfully safeguard their jobs while endangering miners.
The only way to end our current reg-cession is to be a realist. Emotional responses increase pollution, increase job losses, lessen worker safety and endanger our country.
Like the drunk in a bar who thinks being loud and boisterous will protect him from the sober bouncer, reality will eventually intrude for the emotionalists.
Those who think that big talk and boasting will protect them will soon find themselves out in the cold after meeting the sober realities of the world market.
Our only hope may be that there are some politicians who can break the tyranny of emotion over the American economy, the American worker, and the world’s environment the way that the fictional Sen. Jefferson Smith did in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
Because the current Congress, to paraphrase musician John Rich, is “shuttin’ America down.”
Don Blankenship is the chairman and chief executive officer of Massey Energy, America’s fourth-largest coal producer.
