President Barack Obama listens to Carol Browner, assistant to the President for energy and climate change, during a meeting with senior advisors in the Oval Office, June 3, 2010. Photo by Pete Souza

It is a tough thing to do, no matter how articulate I think I can be, no matter how much I have immersed myself into the Chinese culture, no matter how educated my interlocutors are: How does one explain to a Chinese intellectual, a company executive, a high government official or a military officer, America’s economic, energy and environmental policies under Barack Obama?

In early June, I had a chance to do exactly that and I do not remember ever being so tongue tied.

After all, it is China that is supposed to still be a communist country or one that more officially practices “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” But it is hard to find in that country many socialists. If they exist, they are eclipsed by pure capitalists. Certainly there are no government pronouncements that would mean economic hara-kiri for the country. And, energy, in short domestic supply, represents the government’s highest priority. Almost all Chinese recognize that unless they move in fast and furious ways, energy will be the country’s choke point.

I have been going to China several times per year, for more than 20 years. When I arrived there for the first time, the Cold War was still in place and China had just came out from the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. Deng Xiaoping was trying to start a new China.

I miss the Cold War, certainly not the anxiety that it wrought and the tension of nuclear Armageddon between the West and the Soviet Union, and the even more radical Maoist (an adjective that came to mean even more radical Communist) China. What I do miss is the ideological clarity and world balance that it brought. We were supposed to be the capitalist, free enterprise world. Economics was our paramount leader and competition and free markets were our hallmark. They, on the other hand, were supposed to be the centrally controlled, repressed societies, unable to develop, unable to absorb modernity, unable to enter the 21st Century.

We won the Cold War but clearly we have not dominated thereafter. Barack Obama and his policies, from health care to cap-and-trade to government decisions by fiat, and increased spending, and the welfare state, do not represent the presumed victor of the Cold War.

Ideological environmentalism has trumped economic development and has thwarted economic freedom, which was, ostensibly, the motive of the Cold War. Al Gore, before the Tipper French Kiss and before the Nobel Prize for the “Inconvenient Truth” wrote that the “internal combustion engine is the biggest threat to humankind.”

Tell that to the Chinese who are buying more than 40,000 new cars per day.

Make no mistake: global climate change rhetoric -- fully espoused by the Obama Administration -- is a frontal attack on the US and the lifestyle that emanates from its economy and system. The Europeans who adopted it in the first place are not averse to admit that they are jealous of America. The Chinese, who are all too aware of the ramifications of mandatory carbon restrictions on both the world and, in particular, their economy, simply will not play along. They are, at best, bemused. “We believe your science” they will say, saving themselves from entering the rat’s nest of climate science and its implications. But “you do the right thing. Reduce your carbon footprint. We will be applauding while we develop to your level.”

Meanwhile, we have an administration that came to power touting alternatives like solar and wind and the negative-energy-balance biofuels, which everybody, with any common sense, knows that they will never account for more than a couple of percentage points of the world energy mix. Without government subsidies they will be even less.

I had a hope that a president, any president, would level with the American people and explain for the first time that, for decades to come, there are no alternatives to oil, gas and coal. But then there was the BP disaster, providing almost gleeful fodder to the Obama Administration and its allies to reinforce their pre-ordained belief that oil is bad.

None of this prevents the Chinese from spanning the globe for oil and gas, while Americans are watching in a naïve stupor.

In just the last six months, Chinese oil giant Sinopec paid ConocoPhillips $4.65 billion to acquire its share in a Canadian tar sands project. That followed the company’s $2.46 billion acquisition of Angola’s deep-water oil reserves, a $7.56 billion acquisition of Swiss-based Addax Petroleum. CNOOC, China’s third-largest oil company, paid $6 billion to acquire the Brazilian Peregrino field. PetroChina gave Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez a $20 billion loan to be repaid by oil and that was in addition to the company’s announcement it will spend at least $60 billion over the next 10 years to acquire more oil and gas assets abroad.

The Chinese are actually bewildered. After a few drinks and when words become looser and in some ways, more lucid, they have one question. “Why are you letting us do it with no resistance and no competition?" They understand that energy means power and better economics. We no longer seem to get it.