At this point, I don’t think John McCain is running on the same platform he was three months ago.
It’s a really weird thing how, after more than two decades in public service, he’s decided that virtually everything he believed was in need of a refresh. All at once. In the exact same ideological direction. Every time.
Curiouser and curiouser.
James Pethoukis of USNWR has a series of suggestions for McCain on how he can pull some political jiujitsu and turn energy against Obama. (Why has nobody ever thought of something like this before?)
The problem is, all of the solutions boil down to: fuck everything you said before, and paint alternative energy and environmentalism as akin to economic terrorism.
4) Accuse Obama of wanting to launch a pre-emptive war on the American economy. McCain could attack Obama’s plan on two main fronts: its overreliance on alternative energy vs. fossil fuels and nukes, and Obama’s seeming willingness to go ahead with capping carbon emissions even if India and China—America’s two main economic rivals of the future—take a pass. I can almost hear McCain now: “Senator Obama’s policies would be tantamount to unilateral disarmament in our economic competition with our global competitors. It is another example of his naiveté.”
McCain sorta kinda wants to cap carbon emissions, too.
The rest of his suggestions follow the same disturbing line - if it can’t be done cheaply, quickly, and with little to no economic adjustment, then not only is it not worth doing, it’s long-term destructive to our way of life. If the ethos of Republican energy policy is going to be that everything we’ve done has worked well so far, then so be it. But at some point, if India or China comes up with the Next Big Energy Thing, and we’re stuck humming along in ANWR betting that new oil supplies will drive down oil speculation costs while one of our Big Foreign Friends is paying 20 cents on the dollar for the same amount of energy we use, we’re going to be boned in a way that defies all previous concepts of bonage.
Let’s make a deal - we’ll “grow up” and consider the need to drill every bit of oil we can when you grow up and consider the need to be less dependent on oil.
Democrats are going to have to grow up. The oil-rich areas they want to leave untouched are accessible with minimal environmental disturbance, thanks to modern technology. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flattened terminals across the Gulf of Mexico but didn’t cause a single oil spill. As for anticarbon theology, oil will be indispensable over the next half-century and probably longer, like it or not. Airplanes will never fly on woodchips, and you won’t be able to charge your car with a windmill for some time, if ever.
Most of my objection to oil exploration doesn’t come from the environmental effects of the drilling itself (although that’s still a rather large part of it), but rather the frank admission of those supporting it that the drilling is being done in lieu of any rational plan to decrease oil use or pollution from fossil fuels. Supply-side energy policy - and that’s what this is, policy focused entirely on controlling costs through supply as if demand is simply an ever-growing beast - is, for all its supposed capitalist inspiration, anti-innovation and hostile to the idea of a new energy marketplace. The reasons for this are obvious - the bustling current marketplace for oil and the entrenched interests who don’t want to upset the applecart. But it really does make you wish one conservative capitalist would have the guts to stand up and say that the future of energy can be an American future for a better reason than our having some elk to drill around.
UPDATE: Did you know that by zero oil spills, the WSJ actually meant forty-four?
Image used via Creative Commons license from freewine.
When asked about gas prices at the pump, and whether they could go any lower, Sen. McCain said he didn’t think so because “You’ve got a finite supply, basically, and a cartel controlling it.”
This is exactly wrong. There is no finite supply, or if there is we are 100 years away from it.
That’s Larry Kudlow, who apparently has a giant dinosaur bone machine he’s using to churn out pressurized skeletons deep in the caves of Wyoming.
Look, we have the Bakken fields, the outer continental shelf and all the offshore drilling opportunities, ANWR, and so forth. There’s probably over a trillion barrels worth of reserves out there. And Republicans in the Senate are trying to move a deregulated drilling bill through the process. McCain should be backing this and talking about it.
At a time when gas is the highest it’s ever been, this is the exact sale I want to see - let’s become more dependent on our infinite supply of oil!
This is a real turnaround issue for the Republicans and Mr. McCain. But McCain’s not going there.
The Great Republican Turnaround of ‘08: Cheap oil…until it’s more expensive again.
We’ve been through two large-scale oil price shocks in the past 30 years, give or take. The hardest sale you’re going to make right now is that we can send prices downward again quickly and keep them there long-term, especially when you’re not promoting alternative energy solutions to provide a transition away from oil. Drilling doesn’t fix anything, it simply pushes zero hour back slightly further (note Kudlow’s assumption that virtually all the oil drilled goes to American consumers, effectively creating a massive subsidy for American consumption, driving up demand and global oil prices).
We could follow Kudlow’s advice. We could also get drunk and stab our eyes out with shrimp forks, if we really want to do something stupid and not wait several years to find out how bad of an idea it was.
Ezra is talking transit:
Reich suggests making transit funding a major part of the next economic stimulus package, which is a terrific idea. When you’re dealing with an economic downturn heavily related to skyrocketing energy costs, countercyclical spending on transportation alternatives is about the world’s most perfectly tailored policy response. It addresses both the short-term pain and the long-term cause.
One of the things that both Reich and Ezra overlook in the larger scheme of spending more money on public transportation is that lots of cities have such bad and underfunded public transportation not just because of the macro amount of money spent on transportation itself, but because of the decisions made at the municipal level of where and how to structure the transportation they have.
Let’s use Columbus, OH as an example. It’s a growing, sprawling city that’s both trying to revitalize its core areas and keep the new suburban ring development prosperous. White flight doesn’t help, nor does the inability to attract new staple businesses to match the new housing in the downtown urban areas. (We won’t even get into the streetcar.)
It also has a citywide bus line - a line that’s failing because it fails to serve those who need it, which in turn means that those who don’t need it per se but could still benefit from it have little to no incentive to use it. One of the main reasons?
The bus line, which is funded largely by a sales tax, rarely if ever goes near new commercial development.
