Outside the Spectrum

   In domestic news legislators of both parties are falling all over themselves to get in front of the record gas prices and offer solutions about a decade too late. To give democrats some credit, they did propose a lot of these solutions last year, but were blocked by a party-line vote.

   Alternative fuels are not some pie-in-the-sky solution: some of them are based on technology that has been around for a generation. As of right now, Brazil is energy independent, largely because they use fuel mixes that contain 90% ethanol. Brazil, ladies and gentlemen, not exactly a world leader in technology. As Batman’s evil mentor said, “strength is nothing compared to the will to act.”

   But politicians for decades have made only token efforts to reduce our dependence on oil, even though scientists have been saying for years that world oil supply is peaking but demand will continue to explode over the next 40 years. This is, as Thomas Friedman said in today’s New York Times, an iceberg that we have seen coming for miles, but that no one has done anything about.

   This is because the world’s oil companies have no interest in encouraging alternatives to their product. They donate heavily to both political parties. They’ve lobbied governments for years for tax breaks and permission to drill on government land. They bankroll the careers of politicians who promise only small efforts at developing alternative fuels. Judged by market capitalization, Exxon is the biggest company in America. It is joined by three other oil companies in the top ten biggest companies in America. If you don’t think they have a profound impact on US policy you are sadly ignorant.

   Oil companies might be gouging people at the pump, but even if they weren’t the price of gasoline would still be huge. Oil is simply an increasingly scarce resource.

   I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Al Gore, Mr. Environment, had been elected in 2000. It’s impossible to say how much more we would be prepared to handle $70 a barrel oil, but it’s also ridiculous to assert we would be as poorly prepared as we are today after more than five years of the Bush presidency. Our gasoline crisis has been exacerbated, not helped, by our current president. This is what you get when you elect a failed oilman to the presidency.

   As I and many others have written before, the United States needs an Apollo Program for energy independence. We will continue to need this kind of a program when gas prices hit $4 dollars a gallon this summer. We will continue to need this when gas prices reach $5 a gallon in the coming years.

   What we don’t need are more stop-gap solutions and band-aids. What we don’t need is a $100 gas rebate from the federal government, which amounts to two tanks of gas, which will last us one week. What we don’t need to do is drill in ANWR, which, at peak production (many years from now) will only reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 2%. What we don’t need are more refineries: oil companies stopped building them 30 years ago, not because the all-powerful lobby of Greenpeace stopped them, but because they figured it would be most cost effective to simply expand their existing refineries, which they did.

   We need a program to encourage automakers to make cars that can run on ethanol-gasoline fuel mixes that can simply eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. We need to invest in the infrastructure of ethanol refineries and distributors. We need to develop solar power into a technology that can lead to the development of power plants that run cleanly and productively.

   These aren’t far-fetched goals: Brazil’s cars already run on ethanol. The vast majority of our power plants run on coal: it wouldn’t be that hard to replace some power plants that run on oil with solar power.

   This is not the solution of the corporate establishment or their shills in congress. Their solution is laughably simple: drill harder, deeper, and longer. Lift the 19-cent federal tax on gasoline. Throw a Benjamin Franklin at everybody.

   This is basically the oil industry proposing solutions to the problem it created through its proxies. Shame on us for letting it get this far.