Romney’s energy plan: it’s déjà vu again for regressive energy policies

By Marc Jampole

I was expecting to read that Cassandra Peterson, AKA Elvira Mistress of the Night, helped Mitt Romney with his many props as he explained his energy plan yesterday, because it was, as Cassandra in her low-cut, high thigh-slit gown,  used to say,  It’s déjà vu again…and again…and again.

Romney’s plan is the same plan proposed by John McCain and the same plan pursued by Bush II-Cheney. It was Dole’s plan and it was Daddy Bush’s plan. And it was Ronald Reagan’s plan as well: promote and support non-renewable and typically polluting energy sources and withdraw support and promotion from renewable energy sources.

These policies help the behemoth energy companies that are major political donors, and they inconvenience the American public the least over the short term—except for the gradually rising price of energy and average temperatures, and the imperceptible rise in the number of cases of asthma, COPD and other breathing ailments.

There is a hidden method in their madness: once the price of fossil fuels gets high enough, it will eventually become economically feasible for businesses to develop alternative energy without government interference.

Unless of course society breaks down first, as it has so many times in the past, in ancient Crete, Rome, China on several occasions, Cahokia and the Easter Islands, for example. This time, however, social breakdown will likely be assisted by an increase in weather disasters caused by global warming and pandemics breaking out as the diseases of southern climes creep north.

I prefer for the human race to take its fate into its own hands, which, when it comes to energy policy, means focusing on developing and subsidizing solar, wind and viable biofuel energy sources while driving up the cost of fossil fuels by increasing environmental regulations and taxing carbon emissions, all of which will help to slow climate change.

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I continue to get a comment or two a day in response to my column stating that the definition of legitimate rape was when a woman says “no.” The commentators rightly pointed out that sometimes a woman can’t say “no” to a rape: passed out, too afraid, a child with a parent; and what of the “yes” of a 12-year-old to the proposition of a 25-year-old, called statutory rape?  Of course these are rapes, too, and no one has any trouble seeing them as rapes except a handful of some very sick people. 

My remarks responded to the obnoxious concept of “legitimate rape,” which clearly reflects a condemnation of the freedom of contemporary women by conjuring the “illegitimate” rapes theoretically brought on by women wearing certain clothes, teasing, engaging in promiscuous behavior (whatever that is) and other bugaboos.  In no way did I mean to imply that rape required the victim to utter the word, “no,” and I am sorry a few people inferred that meaning.