It's been over four years since George Bush said we need an energy policy. For over four years he's been trying to force through a give away to his pals in the oil industry. This week he'll be at the G8 stonewalling any attempts to curtail or even cap emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Bush and his backers in the extractive industries prefer to bury their heads in the sand, but the rest of us have to live in the real world. We're near our capacity to drill, pump, and mine our way to economic stability.
Today's news that oil is again trading above the $60 mark makes that clear. And as the BBC story notes, "'The market's strong price response to this weather threat again underscores how tightly balanced and vulnerable the entire energy supply system is,' said Tom Wallin, analyst at Energyintel." When a minor hurricane or tropical storm sends oil prices past the $60 range it's a clear sign that we need to stop drilling and start pushing to market renewable energy sources. We need to start building real mass transit systems in the U.S. We need to start really requiring automobiles to be efficient. We need to stop being dependent on a single source of energy. We can't wait four more years.
Imagine if Bush had shown real leadership and said, "we need a hydrogen car on the road in four years." Honda is test leasing one right now, why aren't Ford, GM, etc. doing the same? Instead of tax breaks for the super rich we need tax breaks to replace every single incandescent light bulb with a compact florescent one. We need tax breaks to improve the efficiency of every oil burning furnace or better yet, replace them with something non-fossil fuel based. Of course doing so would require expending a bit more energy in the short term, but would save huge amounts in the long term. Every year, every month that we delay doing something about our reliance on fossil fuels raises the costs of switching over higher and higher. In the meantime our economy will suffer from paying ever increasing costs for fuel. Just imagine the comparative advantage we'd be enjoying now or in the very near future if we had started to migrate away from fossil fuels a decade ago? Imagine how much money we'd have to 'save' Social Security, or invest in education, or.... Yeah, some of this is pie in the sky. There'd be costs in the transition, but if we had done something ten years ago, or even four we'd be that much closer to not being help captive by ever increasing fossil fuel prices. Instead of being on the downward slope of investing in renewables we're locked into the upward slope of fossil fuel prices. That's leadership for you.
The Republicans have been in charge of Congress since the mid to late 90s, and they've done nothing to increase fuel efficiency. They've done nothing to move us away from a fossil fuel based economy. And the Democrats have been right there with them, aiding and abetting. Both parties are beholden to legacy special interests.
