Obama's energy proposals appear to be complete nonsense.

I'm no expert on energy issues, but Obama's plan to "eliminate the need for oil from the entire Middle East and Venezuela oil" in ten years appears to be nonsense.

I did some quick checking and found that OPEC accounts for roughly 37 billion out of the roughly 86 billion barrels of oil produced annually worldwide. (OPEC includes Venezuela and therefore represents a reasonably proxy for the Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil Obama has targeted for elimination.) Oil being a fungible commodity, it's not entirely clear what Obama means when he talks about "eliminating the need for oil" from these two sources. A natural reading would be that he intends to cut U.S. consumption by 43%, which would be the same proportion that Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil bears in relation to total world production.

If that's the case, then we can already say with confidence that his three-part plan for achieving those savings within ten years will be an utter failure.

Part one of the plan calls for massive government handouts and tax credits to encourage the production and sale of plug-in hybrid vehicles, with the goal of putting a million of them on the road in six years. But there are currently 125 million cars on America's highways. How is the addition of a million or so hybrid vehicles going to yield the dramatic reductions in imports he is calling for?

The second part of the plan is to divert tax revenues to promote R&D into solar, wind, and geothermal energy, in order to "require" that these renewables comprise 10% of our energy sources by the end of Obama's first term. (This is up from 5% currently, he states.) However, since none of these renewables can power our automobiles (except for the paltry million new plug-in hybrids he wants to build), it's hard to see how they're going to help reduce oil imports.

The third component of Obama's plan is to "call on businesses, government, and the American people to meet the goal of reducing our demand for electricity 15% by the end of the next decade." This, of course, isn't a plan so much as a statement of a goal. And, it fails to address the larger stated goal of reducing oil imports.

Obviously, the U.S. can generate all the electricity we want through coal, nuclear, and other resources. But increasing electricity production will do nothing to reduce oil imports so long as our cars run on gas. Clearly, the long-term solution is to transition to electric vehicles, and there's already plenty of technological progress being made in that direction. But the suggestion that such a transformation can, or even should, take place within ten years is baloney. Moreover, the switch to electric vehicles will come about not because Barack Obama willed it to be done, but because private enterprise will find a way to produce affordable electric vehicles that are as good or better than the cars we drive today.