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And I don’t mean Elvis, Jesus or (Alec) Guiness.
The energy
picture in the past two weeks has filled TEI with Huck Finn’s yearning
to light out for the woods: In the week after George W. Bush got off
the couch at the Texas ranch to sign the National Energy Act, crude oil
reached, not one, but four new price records.
Fill ’er up?
The
new energy law promises drillin and fillin and livin on good ole King
Earl far, far into the future. Well, at least till the Day After
Tomorrow. At these prices, you had better count the King in when you do
your retirement investment planning. Just the way Texas Congressman and
House Majority Leader Tom De Lay done (The Wall Street Journal reported
that DeLay owns $100,000 worth of stock in Exxon Mobil). The way Texas
Congressman Joe Barton, chairman of the House Energy Committee, done
(his oil stocks have risen 800 percent, according to the Journal). The
way Mississippi Congressman and House Energy Committee vice chair Chip
Pickering done ($500,000 in oil stocks: the Journal).
Barton
has become my new guru on energy. Sorry Amory Lovins. Regrets Rene
Dubos. You gotta like Barton, a guy who takes campaign money from King
Earl, then leads the fight in Congress for the energy legislation that
lets the House of Earl keep its crown for another, oh, 10, 20 years.
You gotta hold in awe an oil industry lackey, who is investigating
climate scientists’ data, and where they get their research funding.
Like he’s an impartial expert, right? Really good. And the media of
fools buys it with a straight face.
Furthermore, I like Barton
because, of all the palaver and ridiculous uber-speak about the energy
package from the president on down to newspaper editorial pages, the
Congressman from Ennis, Texas, alone came up with the one incisive way
to inform public discourse on the whole deal: He called it “a darn good
bill.”
Then there was King Fahd’s funeral in Saudi Arabia. A
sad affair. A day of mourning. A time to, well…suck up. Saudi Arabia:
kingdom of the King. Kingdom of wacky Islam. Birthplace of Osama and
the 9/11 martyrs. Home of the whoppin Jihad. And the funeral doings
produced the photo flashed round the world: a grip and grin of the
Saudi successor, Abdullah, and the American pretender, Prince Dick. And
Cheney is gazing over with sly longing at Abdullah, with the slightly
open, possibly drooling lips that reminded me of the crocodile glancing
at Capt. Hook. We need you, oil man, he seemed to be saying. We depend
on your oil more than ever. And we’ll respect you in the morning, too.
Then
there’s dirty King Coal. He’s a merry old soul, again. Got the remake
he needed in the energy legislation—now known as Clean King Coal—along
with a blank check to keep on doin what he do best: rootin and tootin,
pollutin and shootin them carbon mollykules into the air. The coughing
eagle has landed.
While the Bush regime touted a rosy future
for developing Clean King Coal, they went behind Old Europe’s back and
negotiated an anti-Kyoto treaty among the world’s top coal producers
and users. Take that, France and Germany, and you green wusses in
Denmark and Britain. According to this deal with China, India, Japan,
South Korea and Australia, we’ll ramp up the King to ramp down climate
change. No targets or restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. No need
for any of that junk. Anyway, who’s countin? We don’t need your stinkin
carbon permits. We’ll see carbon—it’s the real thing!
And don’t
forget little King Nuke. He got plucked from his sick bed, and dusted
off to the tune of $2 billion in the energy law to develop a new
generation of nuclear power stations the markets won’t invest in,
because they don’t believe in them. King Nuke will have cradle-to-grave
subsidies, including streamlined permitting, power generation tax
breaks, no cares about radioactive waste and full government
indemnification in the event of a contretemps, such as a nuclear power
station actually going nuclear or Osama and Co. blowin one up and wipin
out a city or two. The government backing will prevent those greedy,
unscrupulous, litigatin attorneys, mostly Democrats, from suing King
Nuke.
No lawsuits, no problem.
So King Nuke is alive and well. And King Coal is back. And King Oil.
The Three Kings. Together again.
Their Kingdom come.
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