Green fairy tales: the Obama administration's energy policy revolves around cutting energy usage and increasing "green" energy supplies. We examine the odds of the plan's success.(ENERGY)(Cover story)

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Many factors have enabled the United States to become the wealthiest nation on Earth: limited government, secure property rights, a free-market capitalist economic system, a relatively stable currency, and an abundance of available energy. One might note that all of these elements are increasingly under attack from politicians, but a successful assault on the access we have to the energy that powers our economy would devastate our country--even if we did everything else right.

We tend to think of energy as being used in factories, yet our American way of life is supported by the need for energy to perform countless tasks. Consider your morning shower where water is pumped from wells, reservoirs, and lakes; filtered; treated; and then once again pumped, up into storage tanks. From there a system of valves and pumps brings it to our water heater. From the shower it flows by gravity to lift stations that carry it to treatment plants where it is screened, filtered, treated, and pumped into rivers often cleaner than it started. Unless we're satisfied with a Third World standard of living (bathing weekly with a bucket of river water), we require copious amounts of reliable energy.

The Obama administration plans to turn conventional wisdom on its ear, advancing a plan wherein, instead of increasing energy supplies, the United States will attempt to decrease energy usage and replace our present reliable energy supply with solar- and wind-energy alternatives. The administration encapsulates its "New Energy for America" plan in six sentence-long bullet points, which we quote verbatim below:

* Provide short-term relief to American families facing pain at the pump

* Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future

* Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined