Dark Helmet can teach us a lot about U.S. energy policy

"So whadda we got? A cuisinart?"

Gas prices are hitting $3.19 per gallon around these parts right now.

The "peak driving season," known for its relationship to high gas prices, is long past.

Yet oil is not only flirting with $100 per barrel prices, it's practically got its hand up her skirt, and its ever-skyrocketing prices will inevitably tank our economy.

China, in its booming economy, is poised to overtake the United States as the world's largest consumer of energy, by 2010, to be exact.

How is China handling its energy needs?

Read this, from here:

To combat higher oil prices, the Chinese are turning increasingly to coal. They plan to build 500 more coal-fired power stations, adding to some 2,000, older plants that spew smoke, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide. The situation is so far out of control that Beijing only recently discovered that Inner Mongolia had built without permission 10 new power plants totaling 8.6 gigawatts. Chinese coal output has doubled in the past five years. China is on course to overtake the US by 2009 as the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide.

So China, understanding that its exponentially booming economy will require equally exponentially increasing amounts of energy to sustain, is actually creating the infrastructure to deal with upcoming demands....

And what about us?

Well, that's where we get this lesson from Dark Helmet:

So, what do we have?

Face it. Our economy, one that is necessarily driven by the availability of cost-effective energy, cannot long sustain itself in light of increasingly prohibitive energy costs. Given our current course of complacency and inaction in kowtowing to the pseudo scientific religion of extreme environmentalism, we are hellbent on a path to share the fates of Greece, Rome, Great Britain, and other once great, but now also-ran civilizations and nations.

The shame of it all, is that it doesn't have to be that way!

The only thing keeping us on the decline on our road to hell is the "good intentions" paved by our nation's leftists .

To fulfill their needs, China's coal-power plants and refinery starts are at the at the rate of approximately one every two days.

And what are we doing? Putting up windmills and burning our food supplies, while in the meantime slipping technologically and economically back into the dark ages.

When will we, as a nation, finally acquire the politically-incorrect gonads to tell the envirowhacko lobby to kiss off, put America first, and exploit and develop our own standing reservoirs of energy?

Those who say that we must abandon our pursuit of and current stores of energy in favor of developing something new are off in la-la-land. We can't afford to put our economy on hold for the next 20- to 30-some odd years until a novel source of energy comes on line.

This policy of sitting on what we have so as not to anger the enviro-whacko left is pure suicide, from both an economic standpoint as well as in terms of our national security.

But the decline of these United States is inevitable only if it is allowed to be thusly engineered.

Folks--We are Americans, and we have more than a cuisinart!

We have a brain trust over 300,000,000 strong; a people that with a history of even fewer numbers have done wonders given the entrepreneurial spirit powered by a free society.

Within three years of the advent of our venture into World War II, we were able to build one of the world's most powerful war machines, practically from scratch.

Within the space of less than a decade, we, the United States, were able to go from simple orbital satellites to sending humans to the moon!

Much to the amazement of many, we do have the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time!

We can tap current traditional sources of energy (we have, at the very least, another 50 years reserve) while simultaneously researching and developing new technologies.

Turn loose the dogs of our war on mediocrity, and let us not go quietly into that good night!

Give us a vision, and get the hell out of our way!

When such is the case, I can assure you that our best days will be ahead of us, not behind us!