RUTHFULLY YOURS

How low can oil prices go? When pundits start competing to predict where the barrel will hit bottom, you know that a rebound is inevitable. It’s the inverse of what happens before a high-price bubble bursts. Only a few years ago forecasters were suggesting that oil might hit $300 a barrel.

The unpleasant reality is that petroleum prices are cyclical. Starting with the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo, they have been through six extremes. Because the peaks and the valleys both wreak financial havoc, producers and politicians imagine a Goldilocks ideal, with prices “just right”—not so high that legislators feel pressure to claw back “windfall profits,” and not so low that suppliers fall like dominoes, destroying jobs and tax revenue.

The latter is what we’re seeing now, with oil falling below $30 a barrel. Survey the damage so far: More than 100,000 jobs are gone, most of them last year. The number of shale rigs in service has collapsed by 60%. Banks are worried about their oil loans. Shale states are readjusting budgets for shortfalls. About $200 billion of oil and gas assets are up for sale world-wide.

American shale oil companies—whose booming production is a principal cause of the global glut—have been hit hard. Last year two dozen defaulted and 15 filed for bankruptcy. Standard & Poor’s puts junk ratings on three-fourths of the oil and gas producers it monitors.

Here’s the big question, the one that makes this cycle different: What happens to shale oil? The jobs and revenues from America’s newest industry literally kept the country out of recession during the years of tepid growth that have characterized the current administration.

A year-long study found that the present legal and regulatory approach to EMP/Space weather threat to America’s nuclear power plants are inadequate and dangerous. This sorry state is anchored in the industry efforts to maintain safety regulations dating back to the 1980s, and a national security mentality relevant at the end of the Cold War.
This has been successful, in part, due to a campaign to brand nuclear power as a clean, safe source of energy. To their credit, the NRC and industry have demonstrated a commitment to safety where design basis events are concerned. However, EMP and GMD are beyond design basis events. Once these occur, there are no guarantees and few strategies with which to cope.

There has only been a handful of nuclear disasters in history, and only one in the U.S. – TMI. It is, therefore, understandable from an economic standpoint that industry is resistant to change. However, this inertia has given rise to a complacent regulatory climate absent adaptive and progressive analysis. More than 30 years have elapsed since this topic was last openly addressed.

Unfortunately, the assumptions borne of the highly controversial 1982 report continue to misinform decision makers even as recent as 2015. Despite these challenges and an NRC and industry galvanized to maintain the status quo, there are signs of progress. Some push for increased standards and regulations has occurred since Fukushima.

However, these efforts have been met with a tepid response from the nuclear industry. To stave off costly infrastructure updates, the industry responded by holding out the FLEX, a plan that is both impractical and dangerous due to an over-reliance on a functioning national infrastructure. Congress recently found, “The current strategy for recovery leaves the United States ill-prepared to respond effectively to an EMP attack that would potentially result in damage to vast numbers of components nearly simultaneously over an unprecedented geographic scale.”

On January 13, 2015 President Obama delivered his last State of the Union Address. His assessment of the state of the union was nothing less than astonishing.

As I listening, incredulously, to his address laden with fabrications, boasts and accusations, I found myself thinking back to my days as an INS agent (when I would question individuals who were suspected of committing crimes and being frustrated that they not only lied but that they would often dodge and weave to avoid directly answering my questions).

I recalled interrogating criminals who seemed delusional, providing supposed justification for committing crimes that ignored the facts or reality or reasonableness. They lived in a parallel universe.

One of my fellow agents- with whom I worked regularly for many years, would listen to such an individual we were questioning, turn to me as say, “I wonder what the color of the sky is in this guy’s world- because it sure as hell isn’t blue!”

On Tuesday night, I found myself wondering at the color of the sky in Mr. Obama’s world.

Within minutes of beginning his speech he said:

Our unique strengths as a nation — our optimism and work ethic, our spirit of discovery, our diversity, our commitment to rule of law — these things give us everything we need to ensure prosperity and security for generations to come.

In fact, it’s that spirit that made the progress of these past seven years possible. It’s how we recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations. It’s how we reformed our health care system, and reinvented our energy sector; how we delivered more care and benefits to our troops and veterans, and how we secured the freedom in every state to marry the person we love.

Under his administration’s executive orders that undermined our immigration laws, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens were provided with employment authorization- often displacing American workers and undermining our national security by providing these illegal aliens with official identity documents without interviewing them or conducting field investigations.