Soccer Dad

Fuels on the hill

In No will to drill (or here) Charles Krauthammer writes:

Let's see: housing meltdown, credit crunch, oil shock not seen since the 1970s. The economy is slowing, unemployment growing and inflation increasing. It's the sixth year of a highly unpopular war, and the president's approval rating is at 30 percent.

The Italian Communist Party could win this election. The American Democratic Party is trying its best to lose it.

Logically, he says, inflate your tires. Sure. But why is this an either/or proposition.

But forget the math. Why is this issue either/or? Who's against properly inflated tires? Let's start a national campaign, Cuban-style, with giant venceremos posters lining the highways. ("Inflate your tires. Victory or death!") Why must there be a choice between encouraging conservation and increasing supply? The logical answer is obvious: Do both.

(But Colossus of Rhodey cautions us not to overinflate, then we'd risk, I suppose "Victory and Death." But I digress.)

Krauthammer continues:

The green fuels the Democrats insist we should be investing in are as yet uneconomical, speculative technologies, still far more expensive than extracted oil and natural gas. We could be decades away. And our economy is teetering. Why would you not drill to provide a steady supply of proven fuels for the next few decades as we make the huge technological and economic transition to renewable energy?

Sure people have great ideas, but when will we see the results. In the meantime we still need to power our economy until the new technologies are ready. This is a point made very well by The Glittering Eye. (That's why I really object to the term "addicted to oil." We need it. We need air to breathe, but no one says that we're addicted to air.)

Finally Krauthammer points out that instead of throwing money at problems that may or may not help solve them faster, providing a greater supply of oil, will ... create jobs!

On the other hand, drilling requires no government program, no newly created bureaucracy, no pie-in-the-sky technologies that no one has yet invented. It requires only one thing, only one act. Lift the moratorium. Private industry will do the rest. And far from draining the treasury, it will replenish it with direct taxes and with the indirect taxes from the thousands of non-subsidized new jobs created.

Krauthammer concludes:

The problem for the Democrats is that the argument for "do everything" is not rocket science. It is common sense. Which is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, surveying the political rubble resulting from her insistence on not even permitting drilling to come to a floor vote, has quietly told her members that they can save their skins and vote for drilling when the pre-election Congress convenes next month. Pelosi says she wants to save the planet. Apparently saving her speakership comes first.

For more along these lines let me recommend two parts of Wolf Howling's series on our energy challenges. Part I is the economics of alternative energy and Part III Why exploit our domestic oil resources. (I don't recommend part II here because it deals with the separate issue of regulation.)

What's going on here is that the practicality of the environmental movement has come up against its cost. Rising energy costs have shown the American public that environmentalism entails costs and the public is not convinced that the benefits are worth those costs. It's one effect of the uncritical free ride environmentalism has received in the media and in politics. I mean who wants to be for smoggy air, undrinkable water or despoiled land? But that isn't what environmentalism has been about in the past 20 - 30 years. It's become more a matter of dictating how we should live. And now the costs of that attitude are coming due.

The Democrats have been wearing the white hats. They've hitched their political fortunes to environmentalism. (Some Republicans including John McCain have too.) The reason that Speaker Pelosi isn't flexible on offshore drilling is because it is catechism of her environmental allies that this is a bad idea. Never mind that it is at once economically and politically sensible. (And as Krauthammer argued last week, it makes sense environmentally too!)

Frankly this is an opportunity for the Republicans to show that environmentalism - while its goals are noble - is a political movement that imposes costs on society and doesn't always accomplish what it sets out to do. This is why John Podhoretz is now urging McCain to support drilling in ANWR.

With this populist issue working for him as no other issue is, McCain would be wise to double down on it. Either in a speech to be given in the next few weeks, or at the convention, he should announce loudly that he has changed his mind on the subject of drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Such an announcement, after years of opposition to ANWR drilling, would be attacked as a flip flop, especially since he reiterated it two months ago on the campaign trail. But that, too, is something McCain could turn to his advantage -- by saying, in essence, that the gas-price crisis is so great and the harm it is doing to American families is so vast that they have caused him to reevaluate his position in light of these new circumstances -- that he is changing course because the American people need him to do so.

As a strategy, there are two advantages to this approach. First, it's provocative and will make news. Second, it will mean that McCain has traveled to a point where Obama simply cannot follow -- because while Obama has signaled some softening on offshore drilling, it will be impossible for him to reverse course on ANWR. And a public that has decided it wants offshore drilling will not mind drilling in ANWR either, once it is presented in the right way.

While Podhoretz doubts that McCain would take this step, it would be of enormous benefit to him and likely to the Republican Party too. It's a shame, because right now is a time when we could see a real change in the politics of environmentalism.

UPDATE: A Rasmussen poll shows that this is the politically correct approach:

For nearly two-thirds (65%), finding new sources of energy is more important that reducing the amount of energy Americans now consume. Twenty-eight percent (28%) think reducing current usage is more important.

(h/t Instapundit)