Obama’s BP Speech Reveals Narcissistic Arrogance
Obama’s second major oil spill speech was the second time he followed the Emanuel Doctrine.
The typical TV sitcom is a clash of disparate personalities, each pursuing his or her own agenda, unable to sincerely empathize with the others. In Tuesday night’s oil spill speech President Obama was a narcissistic Raymond Barone paying lip service to the concerns of the American people while trying to use the oil crisis to maneuver them into unwitting acquiescence with his own priorities.
He began with dramatic phrases to persuade us that he understood the urgency and was on top of the “fight.”
- “I assembled a team of our nations best scientists and engineers…”
- “…we have directed BP to mobilize…”
- “…these efforts should capture up to 90% of the oil…”
- “…we will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes.”
- “…our battle plan going forward…”
He tried to assure us he knew and sympathized with the victims:
- “I’ve talked to shrimpers and fishermen who don’t know how they’re going to support their families this year.”
- “I’ve seen empty docks and restaurants with fewer customers…”
- “I’ve talked to owners of shops and hotels…”
He castigated the Minerals Management Service for malfeasance “over the last decade.” (It’s Bush’s fault.)
To calm our anxieties and prepare us to be more receptive to his agenda items, he promised:
- yet another commission “to understand the causes of this disaster,” and
- a new bureaucracy dedicated to a “long term Gulf Coast Restoration Plan.”
Finally he made the Raymond Barone-like pivot away from our concerns to his priorities. He offered the oil spill crisis as a pretext for a mammoth expansion of government power he has advocated since his Presidential campaign began:
The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.
Thus he began the pitch for Cap and Trade legislation now pending in Congress. It would implement sweeping new taxation of and government power to restrict the production and consumption of not just off-shore oil, but all sources of oil, and most other forms of energy, including natural gas, nuclear and coal. He never mentioned the name of the legislation, Cap and Trade, because it has recently become very unpopular.
He began with a specious statistical comparison that revealed his narcissistic belief that he can dupe the voters with meaningless sophistry:
We consume more than 20% of the world’s oil, but have less than 2% of the world’s oil reserves.
This is ambiguous language, sloppy reasoning, and fictitious data. The 20%/2% ratio is a fallacious comparison of two different statistics:
- Current annual production or extraction of oil, and
- Reserves of oil remaining under the ground.
America does consume some fraction of the world’s current production of oil, but probably not as much as 20%. In truth, the fraction is unknowable because there isn’t enough publicly available data.
Does America have 2% of the world’s oil reserves? The absolute truth is nobody knows. Nobody knows how much oil is under all the lands and all the seas of the world.
Most of the world’s oil production is owned by corrupt, authoritarian governments that are not accountable to anyone, and thus, not required to disclose accurate production or reserve information. Nobody knows how much oil is extracted by all the world’s oil producing nations, so it isn’t possible to determine what fraction the US consumes. And, it’s irrelevant.
The relevant question is, or should be, how much conventional energy does America have? The answer is plenty. Including natural gas, coal and oil we have more than enough to dramatically reduce and possibly even eliminate all oil imports except from Canada. But for decades access to America’s abundant domestic energy supplies has been limited by a political-environmental movement that demands conversion to so-called renewable forms of energy that do not yet exist or are not yet practical or cost effective.
Since most of us are concerned about the economy, Obama attempted to frame his energy taxation and restriction agenda as having something to do with jobs. In truth, the Cap and Trade legislation pending in Congress would strangle the economy and cost America millions of jobs.
The good news is that the next election is only 4 1/2 months away and it appears now that it will dramatically weaken the faction in Congress that drives Obama’s imperial government agenda. The bad news is that he has 4 1/2 months left to find some way to enact Cap and Trade.
To your point, its a shame Obama had to use a spurious consumption argument. It shows dishonesty, or stupidity. Since GDP output by definition requires energy, consumption per GDP output is the appropriate measure.