WhackyNation

President Bush came out swinging today and urged Congress to relax the bans on offshore, Rocky Mountain and ANWR oil drilling:

In the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil. And that means we need to increase supply, especially here at home. So my administration has repeatedly called on Congress to expand domestic oil production. Unfortunately, Democrats on Capitol Hill have rejected virtually every proposal — and now Americans are paying the price at the pump for this obstruction. Congress must face a hard reality: Unless Members are willing to accept gas prices at today’s painful levels — or even higher — our nation must produce more oil. And we must start now..

Of course, the Democrats, including presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama, immediately rejected the proposal.  Said Obama:

This is not something that’s going to give consumers short-term relief and it is not a long-term solution to our problems with fossil fuels generally and oil in particular.

But Bush did not say there are any quick fixes to increasing the domestic oil supply.

According to the Associated Press:

Bush said offshore drilling could yield up to 18 billion barrels of oil over time, although it would take years for production to start. Bush also said offshore drilling would take pressure off prices over time.

Meantime Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, who yesterday called for more drilling, today called for the construction of 45 new nuclear plants:

Every year, these reactors alone spare the atmosphere from the equivalent of nearly all auto emissions in America. Yet for all these benefits, we have not broken ground on a single nuclear plant in over thirty years.

What’s Obama going to say to that?  So far his rhetoric on energy and oil has been anything but slick.

Republicans have finally found a national issue that can strick it to the Democrats.  High-price gasoline is making the great middle class wake up to energy and environmental politics.

I am waiting for the next bumper sticker:

Don’t blame me for high gas prices.  I voted Republican.

Whiney Democrats can’t foist the high cost of gasoline onto President Bush or the Republicans.

No, sir.  Expensive fuel and busting household budgets are the result of a generation of do-good, think-little baby boomers swallowing the Jimmy Carter energy and transportation policies 30 years ago.  Then, as a nation we stopped drilling domestically and stopped building refineries.  The Carter Democrats convinced the boomers that ramping up domestic production would be bad for the environment.  Now these policies are about to seriously hurt the economy when boomers are approaching retirement.

British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward today told the Asia Oil and Gas Conference in Kuala Lampur, “Producers are being hampered by 25 years of low investments, because of low prices.”  He added, “The result is a supply chain being stretched to a breaking point.”

Hayward gets part of the picture, the reality of what is today and the near-term future.  He doesn’t own up to the real reason the refining industry has not added much capacity because B-P is one of those “Green” oil companies that is trying to suck up to the socialist liberals.  The real reason the refining industry hasn’t added capacity is because of the excessive costs involving compliance to over-burdensome environmental regulations.  Economists have been predicting for years the shortfall we are experiencing as China and India have been increasing their demand for oil products.

Washington and Oregon State nambypambyism when it comes to sensible energy policies hasn’t provided any leadership.

But with gasoline prices spiking, the soccer moms who up to this point have been going along with the politically-correct energy policies of the Democrats may take another look at the trade-offs between a way-of-life and ridiculous over-reaching environmental and over-restrictive energy policies.  These moms don’t want to stop driving the kids to practice.  And the bus doesn’t work either.

One of my favorite pastimes these days is to look back into my “I Told You So” file to see which of my many entries over the years has blossomed and become reality. Just the other day, for example, I looked into an “I Told You So” that I shared with my wonderful old friend, the late Dr. Dixy Lee Ray.

There it was. The entry, scribbled and almost worn away by time, read: A great idea that remains to be adopted — collect all the garbage and have the PUDs use their generators to turn the stuff’s methane into usable energy.” The entry was dated 1978, while Dixy was serving as Washington State’s first woman governor.

It was one of the many ideas Dixy tried in vain to get accepted. I tried, too, as a commentator for KIRO-TV and Radio. Again, no action. Then, out of the clear blue and five years after Dixy died, the Public Utility Districts in Klickitat and Snohomish Counties got the message and started using garbage to draw the methane that was utilized as energy.

Well, one might say, better late than never. I remember the Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorializing about “the new source of power” in the late 1990s. Other members of the print and broadcast news media picked up the idea and suddenly discovered that garbage had some great potential, after all. Why in the world weren’t they listening to Dixy?

Among other similar “I Told You So” items were another that still remains to be fully accepted and utilized. That was the proposal Dixy and I made way back in the 1970s to build incineration plants in the state to turn rubbish into usable electric power and save the precious landfills in which the state’s mountains of waste were being buried.

Some progress has been made along that line in recent years, but the state has not yet taken full advantage of the incineration idea. Newly developed incineration plants and systems have been built in several regions in the past couple of decades — and many more are needed.

The new types of incineration adequately answer the complaints voiced by environmental extremists and others. The new plants control the effluents from rubbish and do not emit any gases or fumes from the burning material. Incineration is now one of the most effective and safest ways to get rid of wastes of all kinds.

Nevertheless, most of the “I Told You So” entries in my file have not been fulfilled. Maybe I’ll put them all into a book some day. Here’s one of my longtime favorites, also noted way back in the late 1970s: With the cost of running state government continuing to balloon out of control, why not adopt Nebraska’s unique plan, a unicameral legislature?

Dixy tried hard to cut back on government budgets and expenditures, but she made no headway on it, thanks to the unwillingness of both parties to join her in the effort. State governments are not like Congress. They don’t need both a Senate and a House and their duplicative uses of committees.

A single lawmaking chamber would permit the state to reduce expenditures by the millions and probably billions. In addition, as Nebraska has proved, a single chamber would mean better government, fewer overlapping facilities, and much improved communication of lawmakers with their constituents and with each other. But it remains one of the most important entries in the “I Told You So” file. Mind if I shake my head in disappointment?

Remember that old Broadway show tune, “Promises, Promises”? Well, it has come to mind with reference to the current session of Congress and the fact that early in the session the controlling Democrats in both houses promised rapturously and often that they supported an end to pork, which they began calling “earmarks,” as if to take the curse off the “pork” label.

It didn’t take long for the Demos to forget their political “Promises, Promises.” In the worst display of forgetfulness, the lawmakers poured pork items into the new $290 billion comprehensive farm bill, despite the fact that President Bush had pledged to veto the legislation if it came to him with all the millions of dollars’ worth of pork in it.

True to his word, the President vetoed the bill. But that didn’t faze the Demos, who knew they had the support of all the lawmakers who had laced the farm bill with home-grown pork. Sad to relate, many Republican congressmen, who had invested the bill with their own brand of pork, joined the Demos in both houses to override the veto.

Without the help of the Republicans, it is probable that the President’s veto would have been sustained and the bill would have died the death it deserved. It was another indication that the G.O.P. lawmakers have failed to support their President when he needed their help most.

Fully two-thirds of the enormous farm bill will go to the much abused nutrition program, such as food stamps. The rest will go to equally unnecessary farm subsidies and the program designed as a “charity” allotment to farmers to keep them from planting crops deemed unneeded.

Is it any wonder that the national budget and the nation’s economic reins are out of control and food prices, gasoline prices, the housing crisis, and virtually everything else are leading us to a severe recession — or worse? Unfortunately, the Demos’ love affair with political pork has blinded them to the serious issues that need the lawmakers’ attention.

For example, if the Demos would end their blind love affair with the environmental extremists, they could join the Republicans in approving measures that would put the nation back on a prosperous economic path. One of those actions should be to end the extremists’ campaign to block the creation of new oil refineries.

Thanks to the extremists’ negative action, the U.S. has not built a new oil refinery for more than 30 years. It’s one of the reasons prices at the gasoline pumps have skyrocketed and are now at the $4-a-gallon level. The lack of refineries has placed us at the mercy of the foreign oil-producing nations.

Another equally significant issue related to the gasoline shortage is the failure of the U.S. to build nuclear-power plants, so vital in furnishing the people with inexpensive electric power. We have not built a nuclear plant for more than three decades, while other nations in Europe and Asia are surpassing us in power supplies.

There are many other areas in which the Demos should “divorce” their extremist bedfellows and start taking care of the day-to-day needs of the American people. If American voters are aware of the serious needs, they will vote the Demos out of office at the federal, state, and local levels in November.

Once again, the U.S. Department of Energy has put off a decision concerning the fate of the historic B Reactor at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Hanford was the key installation in the nation’s Manhattan Project, and the B Reactor was the first full-scale nuclear reactor in the world, built back in 1943 as the Second World War raged.

As the Associated Press has stated, it was the B Reactor “that produced plutonium for one of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end the Second World War.” In delaying a decision on the reactor, the Department of Energy declared that a final decision will be delayed until the National Park Service decides whether the reactor will be preserved and made available for public access.

In the meantime, I hope the D.O.E. and the Park Service will heed the words of the onetime chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, my old friend, the late Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, and adopt her frequently made proposal concerning all the original nuclear installations in the nation. Dr. Ray first made her proposal soon after she left the A.E.C. and repeated it many times afterward. And so have I as her longtime co-author, policy adviser, and friend. Her advice was to retain and refurbish Hanford and the other nuclear installations to utilize all of them as laboratories for all types of energy research.

Dixy had an inkling of things to come. She forecast an energy shortage long before the first one hit in 1973 while she was running the A.E.C. And she dealt with the ’73 shortage at length in the superb energy report she made to President Nixon that year — a report that would have solved all our energy problems had Nixon, already feeling the sting of the Watergate scandal, sent it on to congressional leaders. He failed to do so.

Dixy’s proposal for all the nuclear installations went far beyond the suggestion that has been made by Assistant Energy Secretary Jim Rispoli. His proposal is to save the B Reactor as a sort of museum “for people to visit and see because of its importance in American and world history.”

Dr. Ray wanted all the nuclear installations, not just the B Reactor, to serve as the energy laboratories of the future, employing the best scientific and engineering minds available to conduct experiments leading to the development of every form of energy conceivable and thereby give the U.S. total leadership in the field.

The AP’s report tracing the history of the B Reactor is so interesting that some of it bears repeating.

“Construction of the reactor began on June 7, 1943, six months after physicist Enrico Fermi turned the theory of nuclear power into the reality of the Atomic Age. In short order, the reactor produced plutonium for the first man-made nuclear blast, the Trinity test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, and for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.”

The B Reactor was shut down and decommissioned by the Energy Department in 1968, and five of the nine plutonium-producing reactors at Hanford have been dismantled and cocooned, according to the A.P. Many of the men and women who worked at Hanford in the early years have tried in vain to preserve the installation as a museum.

If the U.S. had adopted Dr. Ray’s plan to turn all the nuclear installations into energy-research laboratories, the nation could have saved most of the $50 million it is costing to close them down — plus gaining the great advantages that would result if Dr. Ray’s plan were approved by the D.O.E. and Congress.

We in the United States continue to pay dearly for the failure to build additional nuclear power plants for four decades, thanks to the misguided efforts of the environmental extremists and the whacky anti-nuclear forces. As a result, we have encountered a continuing energy crisis, prompted by soaring gasoline prices.

In the meantime, other nations are adding nuclear plants at a fast clip. The Associated Press has reported that Great Britain is the latest nation to approve a plan to add nuclear-power plants to its power supply, even though it is doing so for the wrong reason — to counter the fear of the non-existent hoax, global warming.

The irony of it all is that the U.S., where the Nuclear Age was born and where the first nuclear-energy plants were built, has fallen far behind many other nations in the percentage of electric power generated by nuclear energy. France remains the leader with 78 percent of nuclear-generated power.

The list of other countries profiting immensely by building nuclear plants should be an embarrassment to us. Right behind France in the percentage list are Lithuania at 69 percent, Belgium at 54 percent, Ukraine at 48 percent, Sweden also at 48 percent, South Korea at 39 percent, Germany at 32 percent, and Japan at 30 percent.

Way down the list in 10^th place is the U.S. with only 18 percent of its total power supply furnished by nuclear plants. At present, America has 110 nuclear power plants. At this point in history, we should have had about 1,000 plants and closing in on a percentage of at least 50 or 60 of the total power supply.

When one also considers that the extremists are also responsible for the fact that the nation has not built a single new oil refinery for close to 40 years, we can understand why the two factors — bans on nuclear plants and refineries — have cost Americans trillions in energy dollars.

But that’s not the whole story. Instead of being close to becoming self-sufficient in energy resources, we have had to rely on foreign nations for more than half of our oil supply, despite the fact that we have massive underground oil reserves that we have not been permitted to bring up for our refineries.

Because of that shortage, we have become involved in the conflicts that have sprung up in the Middle East. Without our dollars, Mideast oil countries would not have been able to finance their wars and other conflicts — and we and other Western Powers could have ignored their Islamofascism.

Sometimes well-meaning people and organizations miss the mark in their proposals for America. A good case in point is the announcement by the usually well-intentioned National Park Service that it has proposed turning the historic B Reactor at Hanford’s nuclear reservation in Eastern Washington into a National Historic Landmark.

I say, good for the Park Service. But I believe it is overlooking a far more important purpose for the Hanford plant — one that the late Dr. Dixy Lee Ray and I tried for years to bring to the attention of Washington State, as well as the federal government and particularly the Department of Energy.

Dixy, who once served as chairman of the old U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, almost wept after the Cold War ended and the federal government reported it was time to close down the nation’s nuclear-energy plants, including Hanford, because they were no longer needed.

She and I joined in our articles, commentaries, and speeches across the country in proposing that Hanford and all other federal nuclear plants be converted into research facilities that would explore all potentials for producing energy, from solar power and windmill power to power sources deep below the earth’s surface.

When we began our crusade for the major conversion in the early 1970s, the nation was in the throes of an oil and energy shortage brought on primarily by the environmental extremists’ movement to halt construction of more nuclear-power plants and to stop the oil industry from building much needed oil refineries.

The conversion of Hanford and other plants would have explored new sources of energy and countered the extremists’ ill-considered campaign. Unfortunately, Congress, heeding the enviros’ propaganda, failed to consider the conversion proposal and shut the doors on progress in the field of energy development.

I can well understand the Park Service’s desire to make Hanford a historic landmark. It’s a worthy proposal and merits approval. But why not combine the two ideas? Hanford could easily stand as a landmark, as well as serving as one of many national laboratories seeking new outlets of energy.

In the meantime, Congress and the federal government should shrug off the ruinous bleatings of the extremists and proceed with approvals of the scores of new nuclear-power plants that should have been built and the large number of oil refineries that would have eased the serious oil shortage.

Remember that it was the oil shortage that made us dependent on foreign oil and helped bring on the crisis in the Middle East.

As the United States and most other nations of the world writhe under the costly damages wrought by rapidly advancing oil prices — and internal conflicts and an international war on terror are linked to the ravages of Big Oil — I recall the efforts of my wonderful old friend, the late Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, to forestall today’s crisis.

As a co-author with Dixy of two national best-sellers, Trashing the Planet and Environmental Overkill, I was well aware of her appeals to reason when she served as chairman of the old U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and for years thereafter as a speaker, along with me, on the national lecture tour.

In fact, I eventually gathered her speeches and mine on many subjects, but primarily on the energy crisis, and published them recently under the title, “She Should Have Been President; The Wisdom of Dixy Lee Ray.” Prominent in the book, as it was in her speeches and mine, as well, was Dixy’s proposal to bring the U.S. close to self-sufficiency in the production of all forms of energy.

If the U.S. and the Presidents she served had adopted Dixy’s energy plan, we would not now be engaged in the wars in Middle East and Afghanistan and would not have to rely on Venezuela and other nations for a supply of oil. Venezuela’s Communist dictator, Hugo Chavez, has used his nation’s oil supply as an anti-U.S. weapon.

On two occasions, Dixy was considered to be the leading candidate for the job of science adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. In each case, politicos in the Ford and Reagan camps prevailed upon them to put aside any thought of giving such an important job to the former atomic-energy chief and a woman who was such an independent individual that she could not “be controlled.”

If Dixy’s extraordinary energy plan had been adopted by Ford or Reagan, the U.S. would now have many more nuclear power plants. And research into solar power and all other potential energy sources would have been carried on full steam ahead. In addition, many more oil-refining plants would have been built in the U.S., in defiance of the environmental extremists, who shut down the American oil industry, in effect.

The most important aspect of Dixy’s plan would have been to eliminate our dependence on oil from Middle East countries, as well as Venezuela and other oil-rich nations. Without a U.S. market, O.P.E.C. and all its members would have been shorn of their power to influence the economies and affairs of the U.S. and European, Asian, and African nations.

Dixy’s plan was first placed in the hands of President Richard Nixon, but he put it on the shelf in the Oval Office and never presented it to Congress because he was already embroiled in the Watergate scandal and lost all interest in governing. What a tragedy that was! I presume her report still lies on that presidential shelf. If only it could be given a decent hearing by Congress!

The same people who whine about the high price of gasoline and energy, are the ones mostly responsible for increasing cost.I’m talking about the Democrats and the Greeners who have blocked every sensible energy policy possible for the past 30 years because of an irrational pagan religion dedicated to “Mother Earth.”

Price of energy is determined by supply and demand.  The Democrats have strangled the supply side of the equation.  By over-protecting the environment, the do-gooders have prevented increased production of domestic oil by blocking offshore drilling and tapping more of Alaska.  Their “environmental” concerns have also discouraged the building of any new refineries in the continental United States in three decades.  The do-gooders have also run up the cost of electricity by blocking coal and nuclear.  Their answer, as was Jimmy Carters, is for all of us to wear sweaters.  Well, folks, sweaters aren’t going to fill up your car, so shut up and quit complaining.  You are getting the benefits of your naivite of the last 30 years.

The tragedy for these do-gooders is that without the hamstrings of their zealous environmental policies, the world and domestic economies could have generated more revenues to help with humanity’s true challenges of ending global poverty and disease.  But, to them, human lives in the undeveloped world are worth wasting in the name of their envirotheocracy.

Historians will have a field day with our generation and its fascination with fads, pop-culture and mass delusion.  I think historians will say our generation squandered the ability to help so many truly needy people worldwide because we prioritized doomsday environmental “solutions” rather than helping the world’s poor and needy to get a leg up.  That job will have to wait for another generation, one better educated and less religious.

I suspect that most of our readers have not been following what has been happening in Eastern Washington, particularly Kittitas County, for the last few months. We are experiencing one of the biggest power grabs in a long time. In the past few months, local land use decisions have been overruled at an alarming rate by unelected state bureacrats. It looks like the Governor has choosen Kittitas County to be a “test case” to see what she can get away with in other counties. I offer the experience of Kittitas County as a warning to all the other counties that think “it won’t happen here.”

I recently published a guest editorial in the Yakima Business Times. I re-post that essay below.

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The Loss of Local Control

“Greetings” my neighbors to the south. I come bearing tidings from Kittitas County that should be of concern to all the people of Yakima County. I know it’s easy to ignore us in our under-populated county north of you, but that is exactly what the State of Washington and her governor hope you will do. There is nothing less than a complete loss of local control at stake and the opening battle is being fought in your backyard. The bad news: the state is winning.

For reasons that are not quite clear, the clumsy and indifferent bureaucracy we call the state of Washington has targeted Kittitas County in an opening assault to seize all land use decisions from local county governments. If they are successful, we will be living in a state where west-side environmentalists will have their boots on the throats of eastern Washington residents. They want our land. They want our water. If we are not careful, they are going to get both.

Kittitas County is currently serving as their proverbial “canary in the coal mine” to see how much they can take before the people push back. My fear is that if Kittitas County capitulates today, the state will be coming for Yakima County tomorrow.

In the last few months, Kittitas County has received a host a World Wrestling Federation slap-downs from our governor and her appointed boards. Our land use laws have been tossed. Our comprehensive plan has been invalidated. Now there is an attempt to shut down our wells. All of these things have been done in direct conflict with our locally elected officials and their democratically arrived at decisions.

In June of this year, the Eastern Washington Growth Management Hearings Board (EWGMHB), a group of unelected Gregoire appointees, issued an “order of invalidity” striking down large portions of the Kittitas County Comprehensive Plan. The urban growth nodes were eliminated. Our ability to create three-acre zoning was thrown into question.

Following closely on the heels of that decision, the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (EFSEC), a group of Gregoire appointees, overruled a local decision to reject a wind farm along the Yakima River. Our County Commissioners had earlier approved the largest wind farm in the state, but felt the location of this farm overly burdened local land owners and environmental concerns. Didn’t matter what our elected officials felt. EFSEC and the Governor told us that our local land use ordinances had no effect and the wind farm will be approved regardless of local input and rule of law. Interestingly there are five “interests” represented on the EFSEC board: Department of Ecology, Fish and Wildlife, Natural Resources, Community Trade and Economic Development, and Utilities and Transportation. Not a single private representative in the group. No one to speak for land owners, private property, or local control.

Just last week, we got hit again. A new group, Aqua Permanente, which is closely aligned with west-side funded radical and fringe environmental groups such as Futurewise and The Ridge, have petitioned the Department of Ecology to prohibit the drilling of any new exempt wells in Kittitas County. We are all holding our breath up here. If we lose this one, most of our land will become worthless and economic development will halt immediately.

Right now, it is only Kittitas County that is suffering the arrogance of unelected Gregoire appointees. But let’s be clear. Although they are only coming for us today, they will be coming for you tomorrow. We are confronting the very real possibility that an indifferent majority of west-side voters will be colonizing eastern Washington. To many of them, we are nothing more than people who happen to live on resources they want. From their perspective, it is acceptable to build homes, factories, and businesses where they, and their children, live. We, however, are supposed to leave our land undeveloped… just in case they want to come fishing, hiking, snowmobiling, or camping in “their” backyard.

At last! About a year ago, one of the greatest mistakes made in America was finally on its way to being rectified, even though it will be immensely difficult to make up for the years since the mistake was made. Rectification came as the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued the first license granted for a major commercial nuclear facility in 30 years!

The Associated Press reported that the construction of a $1.5 billion National Enrichment Facility, under review for two and a half years, could finally begin and that the plant will be ready to sell enriched uranium by early 2009. The construction site is near Eunice, New Mexico, in a community that has been strongly supportive of the resumption of nuclear-plant construction.

One must hope that the building of the New Mexico plant will lead to the creation of several hundred more nuclear-energy power plants throughout the U.S. and begin to make up for the intervening years, in which America lost its supremacy in the field of energy production. Consider what has happened in that 30-year period.

If nuclear power had been made available to many cities and states across America in that 30-year period, the many energy crises in the 1970s and thereafter would never have happened. They were accompanied at the same time by a failure to build the new oil refineries the nation needed desperately.

As a result, we became more dependent upon foreign nations for the supply of oil. And we found ourselves embroiled in the affairs of oil-rich countries in the Middle East, Africa, and South America. Had we been virtually self-sufficient in energy production with ample supplies of oil and commercial nuclear power, we could have avoided involvement in Iraq and elsewhere.

Much more needs to be done than to have the new nuclear plant rise in New Mexico. Congress must see to it that the other once-planned nuclear plants are constructed and that the lid is taken off the scores of oil refineries that should have been built in the past three decades.

At the same time, an accusatory finger should be pointed at the persons and organizations that spearheaded the anti-nuclear movement and the misguided environmental forces that stopped the much needed construction of the sorely needed oil refineries.

Are members of Congress and the American public ready to make amends and to throttle the hysterical anti-nuclear camp and the extremist environmental elements in the nation? I certainly hope so. Failure to do it could bring an economic disaster to the U.S. and dethrone us from the ranks of the First World nations.

To accomplish the much needed sanity, America will need a turnabout in the political, economic, and environmental sentiments of two extremely important elements in the makeup of our republic. First and foremost, our Liberal print and broadcast news media must awaken to the danger of a continued energy crisis.

Second, a similar awakening is needed in the ranks of our college and university faculties, whose members are excessively Liberal and harbor the anti-nuclear and environmentally extremist positions. Wake up, America, before it is too late!

The newspaper headline read: Summer bummer: $4 a gallon?” If she were alive today, my old friend, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, would undoubtedly be playing the familiar game of “I told you so.” She was never given to bragging, but she could have pointed directly to an extremely important report she once submitted to the President of the United States.

I have recounted her experience in detail in my newly published book, She Should Have Been President; The Wisdom of Dixy Lee Ray, and I will offer a brief repeat here because it is perfectly in line with the “I told you so” game she might have played with regard to the outrageously increasing cost of gasoline to American motorists.

Back in 1973, President Richard Nixon called Dixy to a meeting in the Oval Office. It was the time of a national energy crisis brought on by the shortage of gasoline. Dixy was the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, which was staffed by many of the brightest scientific minds in the nation.

Nixon asked Dixy, a world-renowned marine biologist, to come up with a plan to make America self-sufficient in energy of all kinds. Dixy put her A.E.C. scientists to work on the project and also summoned other highly reputed scientists from industry and the colleges and universities to help with the project.

Six months later, Dixy returned to the Oval Office and handed Nixon the finished project, a brilliant proposal for a new U.S. strategy on all forms of energy. She told Nixon that “total self-sufficiency” was not a wise idea but that a plan to end our dependency upon foreign oil and other products was doable.

The plan would have authorized Congress to forge ahead with an end to the unfortunate ban on oil refineries, a resumption of the stalled program for more nuclear power plants, and renewed efforts to explore other energy sources — such as solar power, wind power, and all other potential producers of energy.

Nixon thanked Dixy for her extraordinary effort, but she saw that he seemed listless and no longer interested in the energy shortage. Little wonder. The Watergate scandal had already broken, and Nixon knew then, late in 1973, that his days as President of the U.S. were near an end. In fact, he never submitted Dixy’s plan to Congress, and it is probably still sitting there on a shelf of the Oval Office.

Had her plan for ending the energy shortage been adopted by Congress, we would no longer be dependent upon countries in the Middle East, South America, and elsewhere for a supply of oil. Also, we would not now be embroiled in Iraq or any other nation in the Middle East, Asia, or South America.

At the same time, many more refineries would have been built, and gasoline would now be substantially lower in price than the coming $4-a-gallon envisaged by the newspaper headline. And, with more nuclear-power plants on line, energy would be plentiful and much lower in cost than at present.

Yes, the Watergate scandal cost a President his job, but it did much more damage than that. It reminds us that an enterprising member of Congress could do his nation a great favor by finding Dixy’s report and getting it passed into law by Congress. I have tried to get the ball rolling with letters to members of the Washington State delegation, but, thus far, there has been no response. Dixy would have said: “I told you so.” What a tragedy!

Two of the fastest rising items in today’s economy are (1) prices at the gasoline pump at stations across America, and (2) my temperature. And I’ll bet you’re having the very same reaction. As the greedy oil companies rake in the profits from your pocket and mine, you and I are not just going for a ride. We’re being taken for one.

The oil industry and its refineries can rationalize all they want to about the reasons for the booming gasoline prices. They cannot explain away the fact that oil is actually in oversupply in the U.S. and around the world. But the law of supply and demand has been suspended by the industry because of its insatiable greed and the federal government’s failure to investigate. Gasoline prices should be falling, not rising.

One of the most ironic twists to the whole issue is this: When the Liberals, the Democrats, the Bush haters, the news media, et al, were accusing President Bush and the Republican Party of manipulating oil prices and forcing them downward for political reasons and for votes, they are all silent now that the Democrats are in control and oil prices are soaring. Hmmmmm.

There are several reasons for the out-of-control gasoline supply. One of them is that the ultraliberal environmental extremists can be blamed directly for the role they played in blocking the creation of new, sorely needed refineries in the U.S. That has had a marked effect upon the supply of gasoline and the price paid at the station.

Another reason is that we are, more than ever, at the mercy of oil-producing nations in the Middle East, South America, and elsewhere. This condition could have been eliminated if the U.S. had paid attention to a monumental energy report my old friend, the late Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, produced with the help of scores of the nation’s best minds from private industry and its colleges.

I have detailed that report in my new book, She Should Have Been President, The Wisdom of Dixy Lee Ray, which is just off the press. When she was the chairman of the old U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, President Nixon called on her to gather the best scientific minds available and come up with a study and proposal to make the U.S. totally energy self-sufficient.

That was in 1973. The study was about six months in the making. When it was completed, Dixy took it to Nixon at the White House. However, the Watergate scandal had already broken, and so was the spirit of the President. He thanked her for the report and placed it on the shelf, where it possibly still remains. Nixon never took it to Congress.

If the nation had embarked on the remarkable program Dixy proposed, all energy sources would have been explored and all potentials acted upon, including nuclear energy, solar energy, windmill energy, and all the rest — as well as removal of the bans on new refineries and nuclear plants. If Congress had adopted the plan, the U.S. would not now be fighting a war in the Middle East, nor involved politically in other parts of the world.

Oh, yes. One more factor needs to be considered. Why isn’t competition, the element on which our free economy is based, working in t