In this conservative, confrontational endorsement of the U.S. fossil-fuel industries, Boucher espouses free will, free market and belief in God as catch-all solutions to the national energy crisis. “God,” he exclaims, “put all the resources here for us to use, to support us and to sustain us.” Therefore, people should be “free to follow” their world views and “align the best fuel source to their own individual use.”
Boucher posits that renewable energy is too costly for average Americans who need “low-cost petroleum based energy” and “timesaving petroleum based products and inventions” to live their lives and balance their budgets. He also criticizes government investment in green energy and climate programs, noting “the esoteric benefits of green energy will not be delivered until far into the future, if at all.”
Boucher blames “the environmental left” for forcing “energy efficiency on the culture,” and inflating energy costs. Liberal agendas, he notes, threaten to “destroy the middle class’ leverage to spend less money and have a better standard of living.” The task of solving the energy crisis should be left to private companies. He offers the lighting industry’s recent LED campaign “to reduce lighting energy use by 85%” as an example of a market-led initiative. The colorful graphs help illustrate his points, but the overload of misspellings are distracting.
All of Boucher’s sources, cited at book’s end, are at least ten years old, leading one to wonder when the book was actually written and how reliable his facts are; much has changed in the last decade. Additionally, his denial that humans are to blame for the planet’s catastrophic warming— the world is God’s creation, he argues, so humans are “part of the design, not a flaw in the design”—is unlikely to convince non-religious readers.
Although Boucher lobbies hard for traditional energy sources, it’s middle-class conservatism he’s really preaching here. As such, the author is unlikely to persuade liberals of his viewpoint, while preaching to the choir of conservatives.
Also available in hardcover and ebook.
