Perhaps the Barack Obama campaign needs the services of a mathematician, but it doesn’t take differential calculus to determine that his energy policy doesn’t add up.  Politico reports on Obama’s speech in Lansing, which officially served as the re-launch of his efforts to defuse public anger over Congressional inaction on domestic energy production.  Obama wants to both transfer American transportation from oil to electricity and then cut electrical production as well:

The three main components of Obama’s plan are:

— Get 1 million 150 mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on U.S. roads within six years.

— Require that 10 percent of U.S. energy comes from renewable sources by the end of his first term – more than double the current level.

—Reduce U.S. demand for electricity 15 percent by 2020.

Well, far be it from me to point out the obvious, but the more cars we have that use “plug-in hybrids”, the more demand for electricity will increase.  Apparently, this didn’t catch the attention of the Harvard-educated candidate, but it should catch the attention of the voting public.  Transferring the burden of transportation from gasoline to electricity will vastly increase the need for more generating stations.

Even without the transfer of cars from gas to electrical power, how exactly does Obama plan on cutting electrical demand in the US?  As the economy and the population grow, the need for electricity will continue to expand as well, in order to just maintain the current standard of living, let alone improve it.  Perhaps we will hear more about the electrical equivalent of inflating tires, and Obama does plan to spend billions of dollars weatherizing homes — which Americans do when their energy bills increase anyway.

What happens when the demand doesn’t decrease by 15%?  Where will Obama get the energy needed to power the economy?  He doesn’t answer that question.

And why worry about electrical demand if Obama believes that we will have emission-free mass-production sources on line in the next 10 years?   Electricity in and of itself is completely neutral to the global-warming debate; it’s the source that matters.  If we have solar energy perfected, as an example, why worry about electrical demand?

This sounds like a Luddite philosophy, an energy-hostile policy regardless of its source or its benefits.  Obama wants America to live in a shortage economy, where we become ever more dependent on government to ration energy and in which our standard of living decreases year after year.  Obama talks about Hope, but he’s really selling Despair … and it has started to lose whatever luster it ever had as his energy policies come more into focus.