Al Gore just stepped onstage at Netroots Nation, meaning that I am compelled by my contractual liberalism to post on the environment.

The Wall Street Journal surprisingly opines against carbon-based environmental regulations yesterday.  I am also surprisingly wearing shorts and sandals in Austin.  And Al Gore is also surprisingly handsome and manly.

The thrust of the argument is that the EPA wants to become some Big Brother regulatory agency that would drastically change how our buildings and vehicles are built and operated, regulating much more of the construction and assembly processes in order to ensure a greener and less damaging economy.  Am I the only one who doesn’t see much of a problem with this?

Our economy is, in many critical ways, failing to innovate.  And not the we-made-Crystal-Pepsi failing to innovate, but the we-brought-back-old-Coke-as-Coke-classic failing to innovate.  It’s affecting every sector of our economy, from automobiles to housing to technology, and our main response to it seems to be to promote tax breaks and incentives that keep said industries from failing rather than encouraging them to succeed and new industries to innovate.  If the heavy hand of government needs to come in and shake things up and get us out of this stupor, then so be it - but the fundamental problem with competitiveness in our economy today is that government isn’t doing enough of the right things to shape and focus our economic direction, which has the perverse effect of overloading and even crippling the “free market” with the mandate of government non-intervention.

I got all excited when I saw Farhad Manjoo had a review up of something called the Smart ForTwo, which is a backseat-less small car that can fit into even the scariest small parallel parking spots.  “Ah-a!,” I thought, “People are beginning to wise up to a frustration that drove me out of driving and into bicycling, which is the clusterfuck nature of traffic and parking makes driving just plain miserable.”  Plus, I have a pick-up truck, so I’m already convinced that a lot of people need no more than two seats.  This Smart Fortwo actually has more storage space for luggage and groceries than my truck does without using the truckbed, something you often don’t want to do with something like a suitcase.  But the fact of the matter is most cars out there are taking up a lot more physical space than the owners pretty much ever need—-backseats that never touch a human butt, giant truckbeds that never haul a piece of furniture or a bag of compost.  Massive engines that never get put to use hauling anything more than human beings.  My annoyance at this trend far outstrips my environmental concerns.  On a certain level, it’s also symbolic of the wastefulness of American life.  I’m also easily annoyed by houses that have tons of square footage and the owners have to start being creative about filling it.  I wish the sleeker, smaller trend in computers would spread out to other aspects of American life, but so far, big and garish seems like it’s here to stay.  So any move in the right direction—-prioritizing the compact, the simple, the maneuverable, the economical over the garish, the wasteful, and imposing—-gets me all excited.

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Passenger rail won’t ever replace the airline industry.  That’s because the point is to supplant long distance car travel.  Where passenger rail really looks great is in the Rust Belt, where you have several large urban areas between two and five hours apart from each other from Illinois to Pennsylvania.  Personally, I would have killed the last few years if I could have traveled from Columbus to Cleveland or Cincinnati without putting 300 miles on my car each time. 

Also, this is so wrong, yet so, so right.

The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of McCain’s $300 million electric engine prize is that if we’re willing to sock that much money away for it already, why not just spend the $300 million as startup costs for actually doing it rather than hold it in reserve as a token prize for our next gazillionaire?

My second thought is that if we were going to pursue a program like this, we need to go full force.  $300 million for an enterprise needing billions to succeed and promising tens of billions when it does is eerily reminiscent of the insulting-yet-satisfying redemption rewards you got as a kid (or last week) from Chuck E. Cheese.  Sure, you spent ten dollars to get enough tickets to get a $1.50 notebook and 30-cent pen, but dammit, it was still somehow worthwhile, because it was stuff.  The money you get from the government has the right proportion of input-to-reward, but it lacks the sort of bubbly uselessness that propagates the entire idea. 

I think we should have more useless prizes for otherwise good ideas.  An Iron Man-branded defunct Bradley Tank for inventing cold fusion?  Yes!  HDTVs for planes that are 25% more fuel efficient?  Damn right!  Successful replanning of an entire metro area to reduce gas usage, pollution, and sprawl?  You, my friend, get a Family Guy DVD box set.  Season 2.  Just Season 2.

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.

During the Republican primary, John McCain made a big to-do about how he was going to tackle global warming head-on.

“I will clean up the planet,” McCain said. “I will make global warming a priority.”

McCain often says that he wants to reduce dependence on foreign oil and that he wants to increase the use of nuclear power. His usual line is that these efforts also will help reduce global warming. But yesterday, appearing before a crowd of several hundred in this relatively liberal city, he focused solely on the environmental argument. He didn’t mention nuclear power. He was appealing directly to the state’s sizable environmental community, which includes many independent voters who are taking one last, close look at McCain. The widespread perception is that McCain is battling for the independent vote most strongly with Democrat Barack Obama.

Now, there’s a general orthodoxy surrounding solutions to global warming.  The orthodoxy is that is you have to, well, do something.  Anything.  Battery powered cars, houses made of reused milk crates, solar powered dogs, anything.  McCain did propose one thing, based on old legislation he’d introduced - a cap-and-trade policy for carbon emissions.

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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.

The cover of the latest Earth Island Journal couldn’t be more timely: a picture of a bunch of cars piled up with the word “Roadkill” across it.  (Knowing their audience, I expect angry letters from people who feel this is insensitive to animals.)  So I was naturally eager to read the feature story by Adam Federman, and wasn’t disappointed.  It was about Mayor Bloomberg’s failure to push through a genuinely smart traffic reduction program called “congestion pricing”.  Congestion pricing is a simple concept that’s been implemented successfully in other cities.  You charge people to drive their cars into highly congested parts of town (like the business districts in Manhattan that are permanently clogged) and reinvest the money into public transportation.  New York City was the perfect city to experiment, too, because most people take the subways anyway, so the alternative travel strategies for people are already there and they already know how to use them.  In other cities around the world like Singapore and London have implement the plan with dramatic results—-dropping traffic 45% and 25% respectively, and London has seen emissions fall by 20%. 

Of course, it failed to pass in New York City.  In my various conversations online about the need to get serious about discouraging people from using cars, I’ve seen some shameful liberal dodging, genuine examples of people playing things like the classism card in order to conceal their more right wing urges: You’ll pry the gas pump out of my cold, dead hand!  So I wasn’t entirely surprised by what happened in the story: People played the class card to weasel out of paying a tax for the privilege of adding to New York’s traffic problem.  It was discrimination, you see, against working class people to charge $8 a day to drive into the business districts of Manhattan. 

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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.

While higher gas prices are no fun for any of us, the good news is that the crisis is starting to drift into no-longer-a-crisis-just-a-problem-to-be-solved mode.  People are beginning to accept that high gas prices are here to stay.  The nation is getting over the denial stage, which is the first big step towards rearranging our infrastructure so that we’re less reliant on oil. 

After more than five years of petroleum price increases, American consumers appear to be expecting the worst. A CNN poll taken last week showed that 59 percent of Americans believe it is very likely that they will pay $5 a gallon for gasoline before the end of the year and that an additional 27 percent say it is somewhat likely.

Economists say these expectations make it more probable that people will change behavior rather than simply wait for a turn in the traditional up-and-down cycle of commodity prices. “People now realize that prices may come back down, but they’re not going down to where they were,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com. “We’re going to have to live with higher energy prices for a while. And that’s affecting their behavior and what they buy and don’t buy.”

Like Atrios, I’m surprised and impressed at how quickly the nation is coming to terms with this.  There’s so many excuses people could come up with to tell themselves that oil prices will come down, but people are facing up to reality.  And the sooner the better, because until you’re past denial, you can’t start making changes. 

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