Posted: 10/11/2004
Kerry Pledges Energy Independece; Offers Political Opportunism, Says NCPA Scholar
OCTOBER 11, 2004 – Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry today pledged to make the United States independent from Middle East oil. Yet according to H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), Senator Kerry’s plan is merely a “patchwork of contradictory policies that will never reach the impossible goal of energy independence.”
“Energy independence is a myth,” said Burnett. “Like everything else in this age of globalization, energy is bought and sold on the world market and that is not going to change under any scenario.”
According to the NCPA, estimates indicate that during the next 20 years, U.S. oil consumption will grow by one-third and electricity demand could increase by more than 45 percent. To deal with the increase in demand, the Bush Administration has laid out 105 recommendations, 42 of which encouraged conservation and environmental protection, while 35 of the recommendations deal with diversifying the U.S. energy supply and modernizing our antiquated electric and natural gas delivery systems.
“Kerry has policies – lots of them,” added Burnett. “The problem is that they don’t hang together in any logical way that could even loosely be called a plan. When put together, they either contradict each other or they undermine or are undermined by other policy goals that he has espoused.”
In a soon-to-be published report, Burnett highlights the contradictions and political opportunism of Kerry’s approach to energy. For example:
- Kerry proposes continuing and expanding the use of nuclear energy. However, at the same time he pledges to bar the shipment of nuclear waste to the planned federal storage facility at Yucca Mountain Nevada. This may please Nevada voters, but it flies in the face of 50 years and $6 billion scientific research which indicates that Yucca Mountain is the safest place to store the nation’s mounting nuclear waste stockpile. In addition, it virtually precludes the building of new nuclear power plants since banks won’t fund new plants without a safe option for storing nuclear waste – the liability is just too high.
- Kerry says he supports coal and wants to build clean coal power plants when he’s in West Virginia talking to coal miners. When he campaigns anywhere that coal mining is not a major industry however, Kerry calls for reducing domestic CO 2 emissions into the atmosphere to prevent global warming. Even clean coal plants, should they ever actually become commercially viable, will release CO 2 as an unavoidable by-product of burning coal.
- In response to tight oil markets, Kerry proposes to reduce the price of gasoline and other fuels by halting the filling of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). By contrast, Kerry has rejected exploration and production of oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which contains 10 to 23 times more oil than the SPR can hold when it is completely filled.