CALLER: Hi, Rush, I wanted to ask you whether with the way the economy is being hurt by the higher gas prices and really being squeezed and the truckers are complaining, when the heck is Congress going to get off its stuff and do the right thing for the optional fuel, that is the oil that’s right under our nose in the offshore Alaska, enough is enough.
RUSH: Got me. The very people standing in the way of it are the people running that dog and pony show on the Ed Markey committee today.
CALLER: Exactly. That’s the irony of it. I wish the people would just get real angry and just storm the halls of Congress and phone calls and just say, ‘You can solve the problem. We don’t need these alternate fuels. We have it right under our nose.’
RUSH: Well, here, I’ve got a couple sound bites from Congressman Markey today from Massachusetts. Let me find them. Bill, I want you to listen to these with me. This is before the committee started, it’s on the morning show today on CBS. The cohost Maggie Rodriguez was talking to Ed Markey, and she said, ‘These oil executives, they’re enjoying record profits while we’re paying record prices. You and a lot of Americans say that’s wrong but they’re pretty steadfast in their justification. What can you possibly say or what can happen at these hearings that will change things?’
MARKEY: These unjustifiable profits are reflected in how little some of these companies put into renewable energy resources to find an alternative to oil, and the incredible profits which the companies report and it’s time for them to come to explain to the Congress, but more importantly to the American people, what they plan on doing on alleviating this enormous attack upon consumers and upon the American economy, which oil prices represent.
RUSH: Now, here you have a classic — in the first place, Markey doesn’t even understand the business. In the second place this business talking about taking their profits and putting it into renewable energy resources, what does he think is happening in the private sector? There are all kinds of people trying to come up with alternative fuels and alternative ways of creating and using energy. Big Oil is doing it. That’s their business! Government gave hundreds of billions of dollars a year in grants to people to find this stuff out. But the point is, there isn’t one. We are nowhere near finding something to replace oil with. It’s absurd. I’ll tell you, sometimes, you know, I say this constantly. The most expensive, the most costful thing that we have in this country is ignorance. Ignorance of our population costs us more money than you can possibly imagine. It costs us things in ways other than money. So now everybody hates oil, oil is evil, it’s dirty, it’s filthy, it’s destroying the planet, and it creates obscene profits for these fat cat oil execs, we gotta come up with something else. There isn’t anything else. We’re trying to find it.
As long as we have a free market, we will find it, but I’m going to tell you, folks, let’s say, as an example, that today, ExxonMobil, BP, whatever, any company, some little XYZ widget company puts out a press release, ‘We have developed an alternative source of energy. We have come up with an oil substitute. We have to test this, but we had our preliminary testing, it’s fabulous, it works really, really great, it’s going to initially cost $25 a gallon.’ ‘What? Twenty-five dollars a gallon?’ Yeah, you remember when the first VCR came out, 1,200 bucks. After the affluent and the rich went out there and wasted their money on them, brought the price down for everybody else. Do you think if somebody announces an alternative to oil today it’s going to be cheaper than oil? Where is the thinking on that? What about all the R&D that it’s going to have cost people to do this, what about all the testing? Do some of you in this audience actually think that we are going to be able, even in our lifetimes, to come up with a replacement for oil, in the quantity that we currently use oil? Because if we don’t, the whole thing is academic. We just can’t wipe oil out. We just can’t get rid of it. But think of what the process is going to be to manufacture that much. Where are the factories going to be? Where are the warehouses going to be?
Do you realize how much oil this planet creates and has created and continues to create? And we’re going to wave a magic wand and we’re going to come up with something that replaces it? We’re going to be able to manufacture hundreds of billions of barrels a week, millions of barrels of this stuff a week? What if the process to manufacture this process creates pollution? What if the whole process of creating and manufacturing this alternative, what if itself takes so much energy, causes so much filth? This is one of the most absurd, ridiculous, devoid-of-common-sense pursuits that I have ever heard, and the ignorance of so many Americans to buy into this, thinking that it’s just-around-the-corner possible, and that it somehow is going to be more plentiful and that it is going to be cheaper and that it’s going to be cleaner and it’s going to have no pollution characteristics. There is no utopia. It is the height of irresponsibility for a member of Congress, a chairman of a committee, to sit here and discuss the concept of replacing oil as though it is possible, as though it is imminent, and as though these guys at Big Oil are not doing their fair share to find it.
Now, I know the gasoline price is high, and I know the cost of milk is skyrocketing, and I know the cost of food overall is going through the roof, and these price increases, increased costs are causing a lot of people to modify the way they live. They’re having to choose between do they get the same stuff they usually get at the grocery store and do less outside the home, or whatever, but you have to, in examination all this, if you want to find out why prices are rising, learn a little economics. It’s not just as simple to say that these guys at Big Oil are raping us. The guys at Big Oil don’t set the price, just like the builders of homes don’t set the price. The market sells the price. How many of you have seen a house for-sale sign out in front of the home before it’s bought up? Just because somebody says, ‘I want X for this house,’ doesn’t mean they’re going to get it. Big Oil can’t say, ‘I want $200 for this barrel of oil,’ they’re not going to get it if you can get it elsewhere for $111. Big Oil doesn’t set the price. The commodities market, the futures market in this stuff, they always get a pass, but they play a role in establishing the price here, too. If you think that all of these efforts to wipe out pollution and climate change are not affecting the cost of food, then you need to wake up and understand that everything is related.
If it’s going to cost more for you to fill up at the pump, it’s going to cost the truck drivers more to put diesel, to transfer and to deliver all of these products to the grocery stores from the farm or from the slaughterhouse, to wherever it all goes, and it all adds up. All of these restrictions and all of these efforts to come up with biofuels, even the wackos are now starting to realize, TIME Magazine had a story recently, even the wackos are starting to realize, biofuels are causing more trouble than they’re worth. They’re costing a lot of money to produce. The energy it takes to produce them is not equivalent to what they end up generating, all this was a total smokescreen and much of the global warming hoax is going to have characteristics like this attached to it. Price of rice, worldwide. You know why this is happening? I’m running a little long here, but I’m going to give you two reasons.
Last August I mentioned to you that the biggest problem the president of China has, Hu Jintao, is keeping his rural population rural. He’s gotta keep his rural population in the country. If they storm the cities, A, he’s got a problem, 25 million new jobs a year he’s gotta create, but there’s something else that happens, and this is happening in India, too, and a lot of other places. These people who have traditionally lived in the hills, lived in the sticks, lived in the jungle, lived in the woods are showing up in the cities, and when they get there they want steak instead of rice, or steak with their rice. They want all the things that cities provide. They want cars. Well, this demand does what to price? Be it food, be it energy, be it automobiles, this demand raises prices. This is one of the facts that we have to face of the uncivilized or the undeveloped portions of the world developing themselves.
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