http://www.newsforreal.com/Stephen Pizzo
I don't know if I have the energy to write about the $14.5 billion energy bill that just passed the House by a healthy ( 275-to-156 ) margin.
I'm starting to feel like Mikey, remember Mikey? He was that little kid in the LIFE cereal commercial years ago who never liked anything, until he discovered LIFE cereal. I'm still looking for something that comes out of Washington I can like, unconditionally, enthusiastically, giddily. But this energy bill sure ain't gonna be it.
Before I tell you what's in the bill that I cannot for the life of me understand, let's set the scene.
World demand for oil is skyrocketing at the very moment most experts agree we are running out of the stuff.
America imports 60% of it's oil need, most of it from parts of the world where we are hated and are notoriously politically and socially unstable.
One of those oil producing countries is currently occupied by 150,000 US troops where 1800 have already been killed and several thousand seriously wounded.
Thanks to the burning of so much fossil fuel, ice caps and glaciers are melting worldwide, hurricanes, cyclones, floods and tornados are occurring in record numbers as heat builds in the atmosphere.
Since scarcity provides oil companies an opportunity to gouge consumers, their profits have skyrocketed and now stand at record levels. (Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell alone bagged more than $7 billion and $5 billion respectively during just the second quarter of this year.)
So, what would rational people do faced with such a mess? Well, if you are a member of the US Congress what you do is:
You give oil companies $3 billion.
You give the nuclear industry $3 billion.
You give the coal industry $3 billion
Is it just me or is all that an awful lot of (borrowed) money for an already broke US Treasury to invest in dying technologies? Yikes, $9 billion for polluting, oil and coal energy producers and dangerous, radioactive waste producing, uneconomic nuclear power plants.
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