CRAIGforCONGRESS

Missouri's 7th District, U.S. House of Representatives

  
 

 

 

Congressional Issues 2012
ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT 
The Department of Energy



The 113th Congress should
  • eliminate the U.S. Department of Energy;
  • transfer the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which is responsible for managing the DOE’s nuclear-industrial complex, to the Department of Defense;
  • renegotiate the DOE’s nuclear weapons cleanup programs to reflect prioritization of containment and neutralization of risk rather than removal and return of sites to pristine conditions and transfer cleanup responsibilities to the NNSA;
  • privatize all laboratories, except two of the three weapons laboratories, managed by the DOE;
  • eliminate all research and development programs overseen by the DOE or, failing that, transfer those programs to the National Science Foundation where they would compete with nonenergy research for financial support;
  • sell the assets held by the power marketing administrations to the highest bidders;
  • sell the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; and
  • spin off the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Energy Information Administration, and the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (which is responsible for regulating the long-term disposal of high-level nuclear waste) as independent agencies within the executive branch.

Energy is Good

We need to use MORE energy

This book proves that the "energy crisis" is caused by the government:

It has been incorporated in the author's larger text, Capitalism:

The Free Market gives millions of consumers just the right amount of groceries, computers, automobiles, and clothing, and not just to the rich. We do not need a Federal Department of Computers, nor a Federal Department of Automobiles. Nor do we need a Federal Department of Energy.

Energy is needed to grow food, create shelter and clothing, transport goods around the world, and raise our material standard of living. Without using massive amounts of energy, we will fall back into primitivism and poverty.

We don't need to "conserve" energy, we need to develop cleaner and cheaper energy sources.

The Federal Government is a Bad way to get more energy

• It is unconstitutional to use the federal government to get more energy:

Our current Congressman was first elected to Congress in 1996. In that year, the Republican Party National Platform promised the following:

As a first step in reforming government, we support elimination of the Departments of Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Education, and Energy, and the elimination, defunding or privatization of agencies which are obsolete, redundant, of limited value, or too regional in focus. Examples of agencies we seek to defund or to privatize are the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Legal Services Corporation.

"We the People" never gave the federal government any Constitutional authority over energy industries. Just as we had to amend the Constitution to give the federal government power over the alcohol industry, we must amend the Constitution if we want the federal government to meddle with our energy industry. Since the Constitution gives the federal government no such authority, advocating the abolition of the Department of Energy was the only way Republicans could keep the oath they took to "support the Constitution."

The Department of Energy has not been abolished. Its budget has not even been cut one penny. Clinton's DOE budget in 1996 was less than $17 billion. Today it stands at over $23 billion. Republicans have violated their oath of office.

Every person who signed the Constitution would say our current Congressman has disregarded the oath he took to abide by the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

It is wasteful, inefficient, and counter-productive to rely on the federal government to make energy more accessible.

It is the Free Market -- inventors, investors, industrialists, financiers, businessmen, and consumers freely planning, choosing, purchasing energy and rewarding the best businesses -- that has given us ever-increasing access to energy. The federal government did not hold session and pass a law requiring the creation of refined petroleum, nuclear energy, or any other form of energy. It was "greedy capitalists" that discovered new energy sources and new ways to produce them at lower and lower costs so that more and more people could afford it, and bring capitalists more and more profit, making our standard of living higher and higher.


One Dollar Gas, by L. Neil Smith


Why Politicians Who Talk About
"Energy Independence" Are Frauds:

Related Issues:

Will Government Give Us
"Energy Independence?"

"To overcome this challenge, I announced last November 7 that the United States must embark upon a major effort to achieve self-sufficiency in energy, an effort I called Project Independence. If successful, Project Independence would by 1980 take us to a point where we are no longer dependent to any significant extent upon potentially insecure foreign supplies of energy."
Richard Nixon: Special Message to the Congress on the Energy Crisis. January 23, 1974

 

Electricity Policy
Enron
Worries about Gas Prices


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Environmentalism