Reforms could buttress energy independence
Updated: 07/28/08 6:44 AM
WASHINGTON — The soaring prices of gasoline and heating fuel are as much the product of America’s broken politics, prodded by extremists, as the result of market forces.
How a nation so rich in ingenuity, pluck and natural resources could so suddenly be plunged into economic chaos might be best portrayed by the ancient Greek storyteller whom tradition calls Aesop.
“A wasp settled on a snake’s head,” Aesop wrote, “and tormented the snake by continually stinging. The snake, maddened with the pain, put its head under the wheels of a wagon so that they both died together.”
The moral: “Some people choose to die with their enemies rather than let them live.”
For wasp and snake, substitute rapacious capitalists and die-hard environmentalists, or House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Vice President Dick Cheney, and you get the picture. The only flaw in the parallel is that these well-heeled players aren’t suffering; we are.
There are plenty of great ideas from Republicans and Democrats to buttress energy independence:
Tax breaks and subsidies for use of renewables, stronger fuel conservation laws, better building codes to mandate fuel economy, clean coal, drilling offshore and in the Finger Lakes National Forest, new refineries and nuclear power, and curbing oil futures speculators.
There are good ideas that nobody here is talking about, including breaking up the vertical, regional gasoline marketing combines created under former President Bill Clinton.
A touch of reasonableness on all sides could make a real difference in just a few years. These reforms might just prevent a repetition of the two gulf wars that took the lives of so many young Americans and innocent civilians.
Unfortunately, both parties are offering their proposals on an either-
or basis, so that environmental fanatics, big oil and conservative broadcasters continue to be the only winners. Because, unlike Cheney, Pelosi operates in the daylight, she is at the center of the storm and she is behaving arbitrarily.
Pelosi won’t allow Republicans to offer floor proposals to increase oil and gas exploration offshore, meaning far out-of-sight offshore. She will do almost anything to block efforts to make it easier for business to build new refineries or nuclear power plants.
Having taken a vow to uphold the credo of former Vice President Al Gore, who wants Americans to stop burning oil, gas and coal, and perhaps peat, in 10 years, Pelosi won’t even listen to any plan to uncork the reserves of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
So she wouldn’t look as though she has no answers, Pelosi first proposed draining the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve to bring down gasoline prices, then got the House Democrats to pass, for appearances only, a resolution to take a wee bit from the reserve.
One possible compromise would be to tap the ANWR to expand the petroleum reserve so America wouldn’t be frightened by Iran’s threats to block tankers in the Persian Gulf.
Nearly all of the Democrats representing Western New York — including Sens. Charles E. Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Reps. Brian Higgins of Buffalo and Louise Slaughter of Fairport — share in the blame for the deadlock because they are in the majority, and either back Pelosi or blindly genuflect before the no-drilling, no-refineries and no-nukes altar.
It is a formula for more pain at the pump and another war.
The beard for Senate Democrats is legislation to limit crude and natural gas speculation. However, a powerful coalition of Manhattan- based investors is arrayed against any market reforms. And that means more campaign money for both sides. That in turn suggests that the stingers and the serpents just might leave for August vacations and junkets without doing anything.
