Category Archives: Energy

Cap-and-tax under fire—from the left

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We have a center-left grassroots political action organization here in Indiana, focused on state environmental and energy issues, that comes around once a year wanting petition signatures on whatever their latest issue is—so far, it’s always been something beating up on the energy companies and always something to do with coal-fired plants. I was amused to note that this year, they have two big pushes: one against the local utility, and one against the American Clean Energy and Security Act, better known as Waxman-Markey or the cap-and-trade bill. I wouldn’t have expected that second one, but here was this self-labeled hippie solemnly explaining to me that Waxman-Markey is a bad bill because it’s nothing more than a massive bailout for the coal industry; the way he talked about it, you would have expected to find it was a Republican idea.

The sheet he handed me described the bill thusly:

While Americans have been clamoring for a national energy policy that helps their pocketbooks and the environment, Congress has caved to special interests and drafted a bill that is nothing more than a massive giveaway to the utility industry. ACES . . . was railroaded through the U. S. House (by a vote of 219-212) without proper public input. Now in the U. S. Senate, the bill is subject to even more manipulation from coal and utility lobbying.

The claim is that ACES, drafted in large part by Duke Energy, will protect ratepayers, reduce carbon emissions, and help solve global warming. But it is an attempt to maintain business as usual in the electric utility industry.

The reason for ACES is that in the past 2 to 3 years numerous coal plants have been cancelled because lenders would not assume the risk of financing overly expensive and polluting coal-fire power plants that take years to build. . . .

Coal plants are already financially unviable. Now utility companies need ACES to keep their coal plants running and have an excuse to build more.

Not “a” reason, mind you—“the” reason. The folks who put this together seem completely convinced that there is no environmental motivation behind the cap-and-tax bill at all, only the desire to do favors for coal and energy producers. I don’t have a very high opinion of Nancy Pelosi (who hails from that noted coal-producing city of San Francisco) or Harry Reid (I’m sure coal is king in Nevada, too), but even to me, that seems unduly cynical. Still, if what they’re saying about all the loopholes that have been written in for utility companies is correct, that is indeed another good reason to oppose this very bad bill; and if those of us who oppose it from the Right can make common cause with folks on the Left to bring it down, so much the better.

Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong

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Back in May, I noted that gas prices had climbed by 60 cents a gallon in the previous several weeks and predicted that they would keep climbing; I thought there was a good chance they’d be threatening the $4 per gallon mark again by Labor Day. Instead, they’ve dropped slightly over that time (down below $2.40 a gallon here this morning); the weakness of the economy has stifled the rise that I thought I saw coming, at least for now. (For the long term, I still see people projecting a significant rise in oil prices, and the administration policies that would tend to drive that are still in place.)

I’m glad I was wrong about that. I’m glad because higher gas prices would have taken money out of our pocket as a family; I’m glad because part of the picture in all this is that the energy-tax bill hasn’t passed the Senate; and I’m glad because I think the country’s better off than it would have been had I been right.

Sarah Palin knew what she was doing

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when she stepped down and turned the Alaska governor’s office over to Sean Parnell: he’s been able to govern Alaska without the farrago of nonsense and spite that was draining her time and energy, since he isn’t Target No. 1 for the Left and its battalion of snipers, and he’s been carrying on her policies and approaches the same way she would have, as the ADN points out:

Gov. Sean Parnell is playing the state’s cards just right with the North Slope gas holders. Before they’ll invest billions in a North Slope gas pipeline, they say they need more “fiscal certainty” over future taxes than the state is currently offering. It’s too early to talk about more concessions, says Gov. Parnell. The big three gas holders are split between two different gas line projects, including one led by the state’s licensee, TransCanada. When the gas holders unite behind a common project, Gov. Parnell says, then we can talk about whether more tax certainty is really needed.

That’s absolutely the right call. . . .

With so much at stake, a misstep in this business deal could cost the state billions. As Gov. Parnell has said, in business, one rule is that you don’t negotiate against yourself. You don’t give up valuable things early in the process before you are absolutely certain it’s necessary. . . .

Gov. Parnell is not worried about being “friendly” with the oil and gas industry on the gas line. He’s doing what a responsible Alaska governor should be doing. He is taking a strong stand that protects the business interests of his “shareholders”—Alaska’s citizens—in this multibillion-dollar business deal.

So, she got free of the anklebiters and put herself in a position to influence the direction of this country on a national level through Facebook and other platforms, all without jeopardizing the success of the initiatives she’d begun in Alaska, because she knew she and her successor were on the same page and he had the skills and the understanding to finish what she’d started. Not that it’s really needed at this point, but I’d say that’s yet more vindication of Gov. Palin’s political judgment and the wisdom of her decision to resign.

(Crossposted at Conservatives4Palin)

Calling the administration to account

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During and (especially) after last year’s presidential campaign, there was much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth on the Republican side of the aisle about how the Democrats were so much more hip to social media and Web 2.0 and texting and so on, and how far behind the Republicans were and how much of a disadvantage they were at as a consequence, and how hard the party would have to work to catch up. I’m not sure anyone went quite so far as to claim that this was the only reason Barack Obama won, but there were a few folks who seemed to be thinking that (as there are always people looking to blame the unexpected on something they consider to be a gimmick).

Now, I think we can safely say that at least one prominent Republican gets it: Sarah Palin. As governor of Alaska, she used Twitter to keep Alaskans up on what she was doing and what was going on—as well as giving quick, incisive comments on broader political issues—and won a large number of followers in so doing. Now that she’s left office, she’s turned from the scalpel to the sword, using her Facebook account to go to war with the current administration in Washington, DC, primarily over their efforts to deform the American health-care system; and though she’s wielded Facebook like a rapier, her blows have fallen on the administration’s efforts like great strokes from a claymore, depriving them of momentum and putting them on the defensive. For those of us who think Obamacare is the wrong approach at the wrong time and will only make matters worse, this is a very good thing, a nice change from politics as usual, and reason for real hope.

Just because her focus of late has been on health care (which is, after all, the domestic political issue at the moment), though, doesn’t mean she has nothing else to talk about; energy is still a signature issue for her as well, and so when the Obama administration used the Export-Import Bank to commit $2 billion in loans to fund offshore drilling—in Brazil—she was quick to offer the following comment:

Today’s Wall Street Journal contains some puzzling news for all Americans who are impacted by high energy prices and who share the goal of moving us toward energy independence.

For years, states rich with an abundance of oil and natural gas have been begging Washington, DC politicians for the right to develop their own natural resources on federal lands and off shore. Such development would mean good paying jobs here in the United States (with health benefits) and the resulting royalties and taxes would provide money for federal coffers that would potentially off-set the need for higher income taxes, reduce the federal debt and deficits, or even help fund a trillion dollar health care plan if one were so inclined to support such a plan.

So why is it that during these tough times, when we have great needs at home, the Obama White House is prepared to send more than two billion of your hard-earned tax dollars to Brazil so that the nation’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, can drill off shore and create jobs developing its own resources? That’s all Americans want; but such rational energy development has been continually thwarted by rabid environmentalists, faceless bureaucrats and a seemingly endless parade of lawsuits aimed at shutting down new energy projects.

I’ll speak for the talent I have personally witnessed on the oil fields in Alaska when I say no other country in the world has a stronger workforce than America, no other country in the world has better safety standards than America, and no other country in the world has stricter environmental standards than America. Come to Alaska to witness how oil and gas can be developed simultaneously with the preservation of our eco-system. America has the resources. We deserve the opportunity to develop our resources no less than the Brazilians. Millions of Americans know it is true: “Drill, baby, drill.” Alaska is proof you can drill and develop, and preserve nature, with its magnificent caribou herds passing by the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), completely unaffected. One has to wonder if Obama is playing politics and perhaps refusing a “win” for some states just to play to the left with our money.

The new Gulf of Mexico lease sales tomorrow sound promising and perhaps will move some states in the right direction, but we all know that the extreme environmentalists who serve to block progress elsewhere, including in Alaska, continue to block opportunities. These environmentalists are putting our nation in peril and forcing us to rely on unstable and hostile foreign countries. Mr. Obama can stop the extreme tactics and exert proper government authority to encourage resource development and create jobs and health benefits in the U.S.; instead, he chooses to use American dollars in Brazil that will help to pay the salaries and benefits for Brazilians to drill for resources when the need and desire is great in America.

Buy American is a wonderful slogan, but you can’t say in one breath that you want to strengthen our economy and stimulate it, and then in another ship our much-needed dollars to a nation desperate to drill while depriving us of the same opportunity.

—Sarah Palin

Now, this is not to say that this is a bad deal; in fact, though the Ex-Im Bank doesn’t have a great record, there are some very strong reasons to be very glad the administration made this move. They probably have other reasons as well (such as the fact that it will pump a lot of money into George Soros’ pocket), but those don’t invalidate the deal by any means. It is to say, though, that this deal calls into question the administration’s stance against energy development in the US, because there is simply no coherent way to support offshore drilling in Brazil and at the same time oppose new drilling off the Gulf Coast, in the Chukchi Sea, or in ANWR.

At least, there’s no coherent economic or environmental argument for doing so; which suggests that those aren’t the arguments that really matter to the White House.

We need climate change—in the House of Representatives

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I didn’t have the energy to post on this Friday night, and it’s taken a while to get back to it, but I can’t help thinking that we’ve seen the definitive moment of the Democratic leadership of this Congress: they were in such a hurry to ram through their energy tax, they passed a bill that didn’t even exist. Seriously. As David Freddoso put it,

Through a series of parliamentary inquiries, the Republicans learned that the 300-plus page managers’ amendment, added to the bill last night in the House Rules Committee, has not even been been integrated with the official copy of the 1,090-page bill at the House Clerk’s desk, let alone in any other location. The two documents are side-by-side at the desk as the clerk reads through the instructions in the 300 page document for altering the 1,090 page document.

But they cannot be simply combined, because the amendment contains 300 pages of items like this: “Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)…” How many members of Congress do you suppose have gone through it all to see how it changes the bill?

Global Warming is apparently so urgent that we can’t even wait until members of Congress know what they’re voting on.

There’s supposed to be a section of the bill establishing and regulating a financial derivatives market (that’s the “trade” part of “cap-and-trade”); as of the time the bill was passed, that hadn’t been written yet—there was only a “placeholder.” Barney Frank said it was OK because he was sure they’d put a good system in place, and that was apparently good enough. Somehow, the thought of Barney Frank presiding over a sub-prime carbon market, when herefused to see the collapse of the sub-prime housing market coming, isn’t encouraging.

More than that, the purpose of this haste is to keep people from thinking about the economic effects of this bill, which aren’t going to be good. Bloomberg, the Heritage Foundation, andInvestor’s Business Daily have all laid it out:

As we’ve said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million (see charts below).

Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once put it, by 90% adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted gasoline prices would rise 74%, residential natural gas prices by 55% and the average family’s annual energy bill by $1,500.

Hit hardest by all this would be the “95% of working families” Obama keeps mentioning as being protected from increased taxation. They are protected, that is, unless they use energy. Then they’ll be hit by this draconian energy tax.

Of course, the Democratic majority has been clever enough to make sure that the bill won’t actually take effect until 2012, so that it won’t mess up their chances for re-election in 2010; but once it does, as the Heritage Foundation notes, people will notice:

For a household of four, energy costs go up $436 that year, and they eventually reach $1,241 in 2035 and average $829 annually over that span. Electricity costs go up 90 percent by 2035, gasoline by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent by 2035. The cumulative higher energy costs for a family of four by then will be nearly $20,000.

But direct energy costs are only part of the consumer impact. Nearly everything goes up, since higher energy costs raise production costs. If you look at the total cost of Waxman-Markey, it works out to an average of $2,979 annually from 2012-2035 for a household of four. By 2035 alone, the total cost is over $4,600.

That’s not the only cost, though; Bloomberg notes that this bill will drive a lot of jobs overseas and give foreign energy producers a competitive advantage over American companies. At a time when we’re trying to reduce American dependence on foreign oil, this bill will onlyincrease it.

America’s biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. . . .

“It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment,” Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. . . .

The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported, according to energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie in Houston. Contrary to President Barack Obama’s goal of reducing dependence on overseas energy suppliers, the bill would incent U.S. refiners to import more fuel, said Clayton Mahaffey, an analyst at RedChip Cos. in Maitland, Florida.

“They’ll be searching the globe for refined products that don’t carry the same level of carbon costs,” said Mahaffey, a former Exxon Corp. refinery manager.

In short, this is going to blow a large hole in our economy. And to what purpose? Well, that’s still very much up for debate, as I’ve pointed out a few times. As the IBD editorial continues,

According to an analysis by Chip Knappenberger, administrator of the World Climate Report, the reduction of U.S. CO2 emissions to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050—the goal of the Waxman-Markey bill—would reduce global temperature in 2050 by a mere 0.05 degree Celsius.

Doesn’t sound all that impressive, does it? It’s partly because the countries to which we’ll be shipping all those jobs have significantly poorer environmental records than the US, as Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) notes:

If one truly cares about the planet, why do we want to make steel in China rather than in the United States where our carbon emissions are one-third that of the Chinese per ton of steel produced? One Arkansas refinery recently testified that under a cap-and-tax regime, they would be forced to close their 1,200-employee plant while India builds the largest in the world to ship fuel to the United States with nowhere near the environmental protections we have. We’re not helping the environment by sending industries that operate cleanly and efficiently in the United States to a regulation-free China or India.

That’s probably partly why even within the EPA, there are those who question the value of this bill—but the EPA is unwilling to listen, even to the point of trying to suppress the study challenging global-warming dogma, because “the administration has decided to move forward”and nothing is to be allowed to get in the way (not even the facts). This is a classic example of that “triumph of ideology over science” that the Obama Administration was supposed to be against. Apparently they don’t mind it when it’s leftist ideology. (Or when it gives them the opportunity to pump money to special interests.)

Now, it seems to me there’s hope that the Senate defeats this bill—Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) certainly expects that to happen, and he has a reasonable case—but there was never much for the House, since the House Republicans are functionally irrelevant. That said, I have to give House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) credit for making the most of irrelevance; he didn’t have the votes to back him up, but he did a grand old job of carving up this turkey anyway, in what some dubbed a “mini-filibuster.” The reason for his speech? Informing the House as to what was in that 300-page “managers’ amendment,” so that no one who voted for the bill could claim they didn’t know. Bravo, Mr. Minority Leader. Bravo.

 

Another Alaskan energy solution

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While drilling in ANWR is on the shelf with this administration, Investor’s Business Daily points out that another potential Alaskan energy source has turned out to be far more significant than first thought:

Back in July, when IBD first interviewed the then-little-known governor, [Sarah] Palin emphasized developing Alaska’s Chukchi Sea resources. . . .

At the time, it was thought that Chukchi’s waters northwest of Alaska’s landmass held 30 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

Today, Science magazine reports that the U.S. Geological Survey now finds it holds more than anyone thought—1.6 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered gas, or 30% of the world’s supply and 83 billion barrels of undiscovered oil, 4% of the global conventional resources.

That’s enough U.S. energy to achieve self-sufficiency and never worry about it as a national security question again.

Of course, as with ANWR, there are those who will object, claiming environmental reasons; but here, the calculus is a bit different.  Leaving aside the strong proven safety and environmental record of our offshore drilling operations, the fact is that this isn’t a choice between drilling in the Chukchi Sea or not drilling there.  As the IBD points out, Russia also has territorial rights in the Chukchi Sea, and they won’t be restrained by our environmental niceties—they’re bound to drill there whether we do or not.  The question, rather, is this:  do we want Russia to take all that oil and natural gas, or do we want to take our fair share?

HT:  Ron Devito

Gas prices: onward and upward

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I argued in a post last Wednesday that gas prices will be Barack Obama’s Achilles heel, but that post was incomplete.  I argued that speculation in oil futures (which played a major role in the surge in gas prices after Nancy Pelosi took the speaker’s chair in the House of Representatives) will once again be a major factor, given that the Democratic Congress and administration have foreclosed the possibility of expanded domestic drilling, which was the most important element in driving the price of oil futures down.  I left out a couple other reasons, though.

First, tied to this, one reason why the current administration and congressional leadership are opposed to energy development (aside from, as noted, wind, solar, and the like) is that they don’t think higher gas prices are a bad thing.  Ideologically, they’re committed to reducing fossil-fuel consumption by whatever means they can find to hand, and they recognize that higher prices mean lower usage; therefore, while they’ve been chary about coming out and saying it where people can hear them, they’re all in favor of gas prices going up.  If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be pushing their “cap and trade” bill (that Rep. Henry Waxman, who’s leading the charge on this, hasn’t even read) so hard; after all, let’s call a spade a spade here, what is this thing?  It’s an energy tax, and when it passes (it might take a while, but they’ll figure out a way to get it through Congress), it’s going to boost the price of gas even more.

Second, President Obama has allies in this effort to push gas prices up—allies with names like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chávez.  It is very much in the interests of oil-producing states like Iran and Venezuela to see gas prices go back up so that they will have more money—which their tin-horn-tyrant rulers will then use, not to better the lives of their people, but to fuel their geopolitical ambitions (which is, not so incidentally, not in the interests of America).  As such, they’re going to do whatever they can to return oil prices to the highs they saw last summer.  It’s an effort in which they will no doubt be grateful for the help they get from the U.S. government; one wonders how long it will be before they start channeling Lenin and talking about “the useful idiots in the White House.”

Barack Obama’s Achilles heel

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I commented earlier today on the latest attempt by the OSM (Obama-stream media), in the person of New York Times gossip columnist Maureen Dowd, to pre-emptively defend their adored idol, Barack Obama, by asserting that any terrorist attack during his time in office won’t be his fault, it will be Dick Cheney’s fault. This is, as I noted, not an isolated thing, but part of a broader campaign to ensure that any bad event or outcome is blamed on the Republicans, and primarily on the Bush administration; though a superficially appealing approach, I argued that it infantilizes President Obama and renders him unworthy of respect, because it essentially says that he can’t be held to the same standard as other presidents.  It makes him less effectual, powerful, influential, and important than his predecessor (and even his predecessor’s VP!), and thereby makes him a lesser figure.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I also don’t think people will buy it; we’re too accustomed to the Harry S Truman (“The buck stops here”) approach for many people to swallow “It’s not my fault” coming from our president.  We’ll take a lot of things, but I don’t believe avoidance of responsibility will be one of them.  However, let’s suppose for a moment that I’m wrong.  Let’s suppose that when the first batch of folks the Obama administration releases from Gitmo turn around and help nuke the World Series, or turn a superbug loose on the Washington Mall on the Fourth of July, or whatever they do, that the American public in fact exonerates the president and buys the line that it’s all Dick Cheney’s fault.  Let’s suppose that a year from now, the voters still pin the problems in our banking system on the Bush administration and hold Barack Obama blameless for the failure of his programs.  Let’s suppose that the polls reveal the attitude that if things are getting worse, it’s just because George W. Bush did such a lousy job.

There’s still one thing that the president won’t be able to duck, and it’s something no one seems to be thinking about:  gas prices.  For whatever reason, all the prognostications I’ve seen are ignoring them, effectively assuming that they’ll remain where they were at the beginning of the year—and they won’t.  Indeed, they already haven’t.  Three or four weeks ago, gas prices here were below $1.90 a gallon; right now, they’re sitting at $2.459, and they’re only going to keep going up.  It won’t be long before they’re back over $3 a gallon, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them back over $4 a gallon by Labor Day.

Why?  Because gas prices were driven up in large part by speculation in oil futures, and the biggest thing that drove the price of futures down was Congress’ action in letting the offshore-drilling ban expire.  The prospect of a dramatic expansion in American domestic oil production exerted considerable downward pressure on oil futures, which brought down the price of oil, and thus the price of gas.  That prospect is no longer in place, thanks to the policies of the new administration, which is resolutely opposed to any sort of energy development except for those forms which are supposedly “green.”  That means that the conditions are back in place for oil and gas prices to rise, which they’re already doing; that in turn means that speculating in futures, betting on them to continue to rise, will once again be a profitable activity.  With so many people who are now a lot poorer than they used to be and so few means available for them to correct that situation, it seems likely to me that we’ll once again see speculation start to drive up the price of oil futures, and that the price of gas will once again follow suit.

And if I’m right, there will be no earthly way for Barack Obama or any of his media stooges to blame George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or anyone on the Republican side of the aisle for that—but there will be a great many Republicans, led by Sarah Palin, to say “I told you so.”  It will be all on him, and Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and the rest of the Democratic cabal now running this country, and no way for them to avoid the blame.

Obama, Prince of Denmark: To drill or not to drill

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I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while now: amid the posturing and the squabbling over offshore drilling, there was an interesting contradiction in Barack Obama’s acceptance speech a few weeks ago that few people have caught but that’s worth pointing out. I suspect the reason so few people have caught it is that it takes someone in the energy business, like The Thinklings‘ Bill Roberts, to see it:

Tonight, Obama said that drilling is a “stopgap measure”, not a solution. Right after that he said he’s going to promote clean-burning Natural Gas.Which is great, because the company I work for explores for and produces natural gas.But that’s where it gets weird: to get to natural gas you have to drill for it. And there are trillions of cubic feet of it in the outer continental shelf (OCS) that we’ve all been arguing about all this time.It gets even more complicated: It’s extremely common to get BOTH natural gas and oil out of the same wellbore.Sometimes natural gas is on top of the oil, kind of like a “cap” (and water is often under the oil—oil floats on water). So many wells produce all three products—water, gas, and oil. Sometimes the gas is dissolved in the produced oil and is separated when it gets to the surface.But, bottom line—it makes no sense to say no to drilling while simultaneously touting natural gas.I realize this is probably boring to many of you, but because I work with people who do the work to find the darn stuff, I found that to be a pretty interesting comment.

What this shows is that, like most of us (including Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the leadership in Congress), Sen. Obama doesn’t really know much about energy production and the issues related to it. That’s hardly surprising, but it does mean that at a time when energy prices are a major concern in our economy—and when, as John McCain and Sarah Palin have both pointed out more than once, oil and gas imports are a major foreign-policy concern—the Democratic presidential candidate is offering policy prescriptions in this critical area that are based not on actual knowledge of that area but rather on ideology and political convenience. Thus we see him doing things like “saying no to drilling while simultaneously touting natural gas,” just because he doesn’t know enough to know that he’s contradicted himself.This is one of the things which makes Sen. McCain’s choice of Gov. Palin so striking. She’s taken flak from both sides of the aisle for not being broadly and deeply versed in foreign policy and matters of national security, and he’s taken flak for choosing a nominee who lacks that kind of understanding; and there’s no question that she has a lot to learn in that area, and that the wisdom of choosing her as the VP nominee will depend to a considerable extent on her ability to do so quickly. That said, however, what she does have that’s far harder to find is a broad and deep understanding, both at the political level and at the down-and-dirty practical level, of the energy industry, energy policy, and all its manifold ramifications. She knows how to address these issues, and she’s managed to do so without ending up in Big Oil’s pocket, which is probably almost as valuable. At a time when energy policy is critically important both domestically and internationally, when the GOP nominee for President is already more than qualified to handle national-security issues but is not conversant with energy issues, I think Gov. Palin’s expertise in this area is a powerful qualification—and a pointed contrast to the ignorance on the Democratic ticket.

Our best weapon against Iran? Oil prices

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Even ahead of China, Iran is the most difficult problem we have in foreign policy right now. As John McCain said in his speech last night, the ayatollahs are the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world (starting with their wholly-owned subsidiary, Hamas), and they’re very hard to get at; for reasons of terrain alone, a traditional military response such as an invasion would be extremely unwise. Add in other considerations, and the advisability of such an approach only decreases. And yet, contra Joe Biden, we can’t just let them do whatever they feel like doing. So what do we do?One option might be what the old KGB called mokrie dela—”wet work,” such as assassinations and clandestine subversion—but that’s probably not the best way to go; not only is it morally problematic, but historically, we aren’t very good at it. This does, however, raise the thought that a more subversive approach to the Iranian government, especially in light of rising domestic disaffection in that country, is probably the one to take; what brute force can’t accomplish, geopolitical judo might. And as Emanuele Ottolenghi points out, a recent IMF report on the Iranian economy shows us how to do that, or at least how to begin: do everything possible, from increasing domestic production to pressure on OPEC, to bring the price of crude oil back down below $85 a barrel. Not only would that be good for the American economy, it would throw the Iranian economy into crisis. The current high price of oil has propped up the current regime there and funded its quest for WMDs and its adventures in international terrorism; knocking the ayatollahs’ feet out from under them, economically speaking, would at the very least cripple their international ambitions, and quite possibly start an earthquake that would bring them down altogether.