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Friday, June 20, 2008
No-drilling energy policy no way to get out of oil crisis
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Conservatives have to be good listeners.
When mired in traffic congestion, sucking up $4 gas because politicians add density but not highway capacity, those who see roads as escape tunnels to tree-killing “sprawl” employ a coded language. When you hear them say “we can’t build our way out of traffic congestion” and therefore “alternatives” should be funded, grab your wallet, your anti-anxiety pills and leave home early. What they’re saying is: No roads, no way.
In the U.S. Senate last week, Majority Leader Harry Reid uttered the energy version of the same message to motorists who are, in the words of U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, “mad as hell” about $4 gas. “Despite what President Bush, John McCain and their friends in the oil industry claim, we cannot drill our way out of this problem,” said Reid, reading from the same script as his House counterpart, Nancy Pelosi.
Such is the tenor of intellectual engagement in Congress, an institution that’s grown more dysfunctional than the dregs of life on a Jerry Springer stage. Nobody, of course, has ever insisted that the United States can drill its way out of the $4-per-gallon gas problem, but just as more highway capacity is an obvious solution to traffic congestion, more efforts to find oil — and to refine it into gasoline — are essential elements of a national energy policy.
Chambliss, in a conversation this week, insists that it’s time to ratchet down the rhetoric, “to take some of the politics out of this thing, because we are at loggerheads. I will tell you that the immigration issue was intense, but everybody is affected by the gas-price situation, and they are upset … they are mad as hell.”
He hopes this week to strike a compromise. It would involve Republican capitulation on drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, with recoverable reserves estimated at 10.3 billion barrels, while Democrats would agree to open offshore areas, with reserves estimated at 18 billion barrels, and oil shale stores in the West. In Utah, Colorado and Wyoming those represent reserves of 800 billion barrels, President Bush said this week.
Democrats shut down on drilling altogether, and even McCain foolishly opposes opening ANWR, a part of Alaska that’s equivalent to an area half the size of Lake Lanier in an area half the size of the state of Georgia.
Pelosi said oil companies already have leases on 68 million acres that they’re not tapping. “There are some areas where they haven’t drilled,” Chambliss said, “but their contention that there are 68 million acres is simply wrong. There are areas under lease, but the geologists will tell you that there’s no oil where they had the lease. That’s a pretty bogus argument.”
Alfred W. “Bill” Jones III, chairman and CEO of coastal Georgia’s Sea Island Co., was among those once adamantly opposed to offshore drilling. He’s reconsidered. “We did have very strong objections, but it is hard to have that same sense of the fact that it shouldn’t be done given the price of oil and our current economic conditions,” Jones said Friday. “While we may still be opposed to offshore drilling and don’t necessarily think it is the answer, we have a hard time arguing against it today.”
As part of a national energy plan that included “broad conservation policies, more refining capacity, alternative energy sources” and appropriate safeguards and distances from shore, “it is getting hard to argue against it.” He’d prefer 50 miles offshore; Chambliss says 25 or 50, but in neither case would rigs be visible from shore.
Jones and Chambliss both note that during the devastating hurricanes that swept through the Gulf of Mexico, “there wasn’t one drop spilled in the gulf with Katrina and Rita blowing through.”
More exploration now won’t have immediate impact, sure. But had former President Bill Clinton not vetoed legislation passed in 1995 to open a tiny part of ANWR, that oil would be flowing now. “No Never” is not intelligent energy policy.
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The smoker, felon voters, frozen food
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Oh, yeah, Shirley, sure. Cut the check. Atlanta taxpayers and utility customers are at the limit of their tolerance on taxes, and therefore the feds should cut a check. People want to know, she told a U.S. Senate committee, “why didn’t the federal government help us more?” The Atlanta mayor also thinks Georgia should raise the gas tax to help. Don’t tax me; tax thee to help me. Spend.
Ordinarily I’d agree that doctors know best. But if U.S. District Court Judge Tom Thrash’s decison stands ordering the state to issue a blank check in Medicaid cases, it’s an invitation to waste, fraud and abuse. A physician prescribed 94 hours a week of private nursing care for a developmentally disabled 13-year-old. The state approved 84. The judge said the state has no discretion. An appeal is in order.
Oh, goodness. Barack Obama’s in trouble with the lefties. He smokes. Cigarettes. He can’t be president. Hillary declared the White House a smoke-free zone in 1993.
When the government’s bailing us out, we never learn. We’re not out of one mortgage crisis before we invite another. Freddie Mac, a government-chartered private company, touts a mortgage program that allows buyers to put no money down and to get 105 percent of the purchase price. But not to worry. The mortgages will be packaged up with some sound ones and sold to investors. But wait. That’s how this bad movie started.
Wall Street Journal reporters generally know what they’re hearing when conducting interviews about taxes, business and the economy. The outlook Barack Obama offers “appears like a return to an older-style big-government Democratic platform skeptical of market forces,” news reporters write. Change. To yesterday. But then those who have listened to him already know that.
Raul Castro, in what is being called his “boldest break yet from socialism,” directs state companies to develop a salary structure that pays hard workers more than slackards. Pay for performance. What a novel idea. One day even the teachers unions in this country will take the bold break from socialism. The view of the National Education Association is that merit pay “undermines the collegial relationship among teachers.” It will in Cuba, too, when the loafers discover that the performers have bigger paychecks. They’ll either work harder or organize.
Hmmm. Would we prefer to have the third term of George W. Bush, as Obama refers to the McCain candidacy, or the second term of Jimmy Carter, as McCain describes an Obama presidency? Easy call.
But it’s true. The effort by Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia to restore voting rights to felons is an effort to kick up the Democratic vote. Except for former state school Superintendent Linda Schrenko and former state Rep. Robin Williams, both Augusta-area Republicans, all the people in jail are Democrats, wrongly convicted, too. I’m sure of it.
The story of the illegal immigrant from Guatemala —- hired as a day laborer and then shot and killed by an off-duty DeKalb County deputy who said Marcial Cax-Puluc killed his wife in an attempted robbery —- is most bizarre. The most thorough investigation possible is warranted.
Food manufacturers in Mexico promise to “freeze” prices on 150 food items, including canned tuna and tomatoes, fruit juice, oil, flour and coffee, until Dec. 31. One of three things will happen: 1) said items will disappear; 2) taxpayers will pay the difference in the form of subsidies; 3) manufacturers will squeeze producers and raise other prices to cover those that are frozen. There is a fourth option, I suppose. Mexico can export its excess demand to the U.S., as it’s done for years.
Pike Family Nurseries has to be kid-friendly. Its former CEO is one.
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