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.
Democrats have the advantage on just about every
domestic issue, from health care to education. However,
Americans' greatest concern is the economy, and their greatest
economic concern is energy (by a significant margin: 37 percent to
21 percent for inflation). Yet Democrats have forfeited the issue
of increased drilling for domestic oil and gas. By a margin of 2-1,
Americans want to lift the moratorium preventing drilling on the
Outer Continental Shelf, thus unlocking vast energy resources shut
down for the last 27 years.
Democrats have been adamantly opposed. They say
that we cannot drill our way out of the oil crisis. Of course not.
But it is equally obvious that we cannot solar or wind or biomass
our way out. Does this mean because any one measure cannot solve a
problem, it needs to be rejected?
Barack Obama remains opposed to new offshore
drilling (although he now says he would accept a highly restricted
version as part of a comprehensive package). Just last week, he
claimed that if only Americans would inflate their tires properly
and get regular tuneups, 'we could save all the oil that
they're talking about getting off drilling.' This is
bizarre. By any reasonable calculation of annual tire-inflation and
tuneup savings, the Outer Continental Shelf holds nearly a hundred
times as much oil. As for oil shale, also under federal moratorium,
after a thousand years of driving with Obama-inflated tires and
Obama-tuned engines, we would still have saved only one-fifth the
oil shale available in the United States.
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.
Do everything. Wind and solar. A tire gauge in
every mailbox. Hell, a team of oxen for every family (to pull their
gasoline-drained SUVs). The consensus in the country, logically
unassailable and politically unbeatable, is to do everything
possible to both increase supply and reduce demand, because we have
a problem that's been killing our economy and threatening our
national security. And no one measure is sufficient.
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?
Congressional Democrats demand instead a clampdown
on 'speculators.' The Democrats proposed this a month ago.
In the meantime, 'speculators' have driven the price down
by $25 a barrel. Still want to stop them? In what universe do
traders only bet on the price going up?
On Monday, Obama outlined a major plan with
mandates and immense government investment in such things as
electric cars and renewables. Fine, let's throw a few tens of
billions at this and see what sticks. But success will not just
require huge amounts of money. It will require equally huge amounts
of time and luck.
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.
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.
Charles Krauthammer's column appears Sunday on
editorial pages of The Seatle Times.
