You may have heard on the news last week that Venezuelan socialist dictator Hugo Chavez has threatened to cut off oil sales to the United States, which totals about 1.2 million barrels a day. Should this happen, we can expect a significant increase in gasoline prices. This latest stunt by the Venezuelan thug isn’t anything out of the blue. It also wouldn’t be a problem if we had an energy policy that was more than gibberish on a piece of paper.

Chavez sees himself as a modern day Simon Bolivar, the Venezuelan born revolutionary who is revered in South America for liberating several of the countries from Spain in the early nineteenth century. Unlike Bolivar, who was a wealthy blue-blooded Spaniard, educated as a gentleman in Spain; Chavez is a former Army paratrooper who rose through the ranks to Lt. Colonel. Before being elected president, he attempted to over-throw the government in a military coup in 1992. Under his watch, Venezuela has become one of the more corrupt nations of Latin America.

 We have only ourselves (Washington) to blame for being held hostage by OPEC or threatened by some tin-pot Latin American buffoon. Our energy policy is a joke.

The 2007 Senate Energy legislation contains a number of conservation measures such as “Automakers would have to produce passenger vehicles, including light trucks and SUVs that would get an average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, a rise of about 10 m.p.g. from today.” That means cars of the future will have to be powered by lawn mower engines and made of balsa wood and crepe paper in order to achieve that kind of gas mileage. They require an increase in the use of ethanol in motor fuel to at least 36 billion gallons annually by 2022—seven times what the industry produced last year. It’s been proven that ethanol requires more energy to produce than it saves. It will require more farmland to produce the corn than we currently have available. This, in turn, will drive up the price of corn to the point where it will become too expensive to eat or feed to livestock.

That’s just for starters. The 2008 proposed energy legislation will contain huge tax increases for oil companies. You’ve no doubt read or heard of their record profits since the price of oil has been skyrocketing. But you have probably not heard of the record taxes the oil companies have been paying.  Ben Lieberman is Senior Policy Analyst in Energy and the Environment in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, he says “The average effective tax rate for major integrated oil and natural gas companies is actually higher then the average rate of 32.3 percent for the market as a whole, according to the Tax Foundation… This effective tax rate of 37 percent in 2006 is in line with (and actually a bit higher than) large corporations in general.”

There’s not a word in our current energy policy that has anything to do with producing the oil we already have. There are no plans to deal with ANWR or our huge offshore reserves.  There are no plans to expedite the construction of new refineries or nuclear power plants. The congress and apparently the president have caved to the environmentalist greenies out there. We are effectively being sabotaged by the Democrats in congress who are against any kind of realistic energy policy. It’s much more fun to keep us dependent on unstable oil sources while blaming the president for high gasoline prices not having a comprehensive energy plan.

The right thing to do is to ignore the demonstrators. They will never be happy as long as people other than themselves walk the earth. Drill in ANWR and don’t worry about inconveniencing a caribou or polar bear. Drill offshore from both coasts and in the new deep water discoveries in the gulf. We have more than enough oil in the ground to see us through until hydrogen automobile engines are perfected.