Memorial Day: Hit the Open Road!
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 27, 2016“Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family, friends, and the great outdoors. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of these travel expenditures on fuel, while at the same time fighting for decreased public health and climate-change protections.”
– Center for American Progress (and Climate Progress), three years ago.
The American Automobile Association predicts that 38 million Americans will hit the open road this Memorial Day weekend, the second highest in history. Affordable, reliable, widely available gasoline and diesel is a big reason. And maybe Americans are fleeing their economic woes under the current Administration.
While we wait for the anti-energy, glass-emptying Center for American Progress (not Prosperity) to psychologically retool, the rest of us can be optimistic.
Get happy. Summer beckons. Not only bike and hike but also drive, bus, train, and fly to a better environment–your self-selected environment.
The automobile is environmentalism-on-wheels. The open road is freedom to escape the concrete for the great beyond. Mountains, rivers, hills, forests, even beautiful green golf courses–it is all a drive away. (And if it makes you happy CAP, those ‘huge profits’ of “Big Oil’ are a few years absent.)
Everyone else: forget the spin and go for a spin!
Each year, MasterResource celebrates the beginning of the peak-driving season knowing that our free-market philosophy is about energy abundance and affordability and reliability. And there is little to apologize for. When is the last time you got a bad tank of gasoline, anyway?
Oil, gas, and coal have been and continue to be technologically transformed into super-clean energy resources. Carbon-based energies are growing more abundant, not less. And energy/climate alarmism is losing steam on all fronts (except the shouting).
The real energy sustainability problem is statism, not free consumer choice. As Matt Ridley concluded: “There is little doubt that the damage being done by climate-change policies currently exceeds the damage being done by climate change.” As Alex Epstein is telling each one of us to tell our neighbors: I Love Fossil Fuels.
Energy is the master resource. Motorized transportation is freedom-of-movement. So, like that old Shell commercial said, Let’s Go!
We’re on it!