Karl Rove's evil political genius can be summed up in one directive: take your opponent's perceived strength and turn it into a weakness. This strategy, of course, gave us swiftboating and the Obama "celebrity" nonsense. Republicans have been using it effectively on Democrats for years.
McCain and Palin have now given us and the Obama campaign a golden opportunity to hoist them with their own petard. In her interview with Charles Gibson last night, Palin claimed that her knowledge of energy issues qualified her as a national security expert. McCain took this a step further claiming in an interview yesterday that Palin "knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America." (check the 4:15 mark).
Oh, really...
Moose antlers, get ready to meet tree...
Palin and the McCain campaign have been pushing a number of ridiculous claims/memes. There are four that jump out:
Ridiculous claim #1: "Alaska provides 20 percent of America's energy supply."
The first question to ask her is: how do you come up with 20 percent? Is it 20 percent of U.S. energy consumption, petroleum consumption, or petroleum production? The accurate statement is that Alaska supplies 20 percent of domestic U.S. petroleum production. Yet if you examine the statistics, it confirms what we all know: the U.S. imports 2/3 of its petroleum supply and domestically produces 1/3. In other words, U.S. production accounts for about 7 million barrels per day, and imports supply 13 million barrels per day.
Alaska thus produces less than 7% of U.S. petroleum consumption. Well, maybe Plain's 20 percent was also including all the natural gas that's going through the $40 billion pipeline that is years from reality? Nope. Turns out Alaska doesn't exportmuch natural gas to the lower 48, either, and its exports provide a miniscule percentage of natural gas consumption: 3/10 of one percent.
So we are left with Alaska's petroleum contribution to America's energy needs. But petroleum only makes up 40 percentof our annual energy consumption. Thus, if one considers all sources of energy consumption in the United States--including electricity, which Palin has ignored--then Alaska supplies less than 3 percent of our energy needs. Palin's "20 percent" claim is thus an exaggeration between a factor of three (if one considers total U.S. petroleum consumption only) and seven (if one considers total U.S. energy consumption), which is par for the "straight talking" course.
Ridiculous claim #2: Knowledge of petroleum makes one an "energy expert" on everything, including electricity
When it comes to electricity, Palin's Alaska is once again an anomaly. In 2006, when Palin became governor, electricity generation in Alaska came from the following sources:
Natural gas: 61%
Hydroelectric: 18%
Petroleum: 12%
Coal: 9%
Renewables: less than 1%
Nuclear: 0%
This is markedly different from the national averages for U.S electricity production, which break down as follows:
Coal: 49%
Natural gas 20%
Nuclear: 19%
Hydroelectric: 7%
Renewables: 2%
Petroleum: 2%
Also, for what it's worth from the same chart, Alaska's electricity consumption is 2/10 of one percent of total U.S. electricity consumption.
So what, pray tell, does the person "who knows more about energy than probably anyone in the United States" know about McCain's plan to build 45 new nuclear power plants when she doesn't even have one in her state? How can someone be an "expert" in (dubious) concepts like clean coal, when her state generates less than 10 percent of its electricity from coal, one-fifth the national average? And what can Palin possibly know about renewable energy (particularly wind, as Alaska is well-suited for wind but not solar), when her state is well below the national average there as well?
Ridiculous claim #3: "Drill, baby, drill"
The notion that increasing offshore drilling could increase available petroleum supply has been thoroughly debunked. Yet the "expertise" issue here, as laid out so wonderfully by Brian Schweitzer at the Democratic convention, is one a fifth-grader can figure out:
Given the fact that we import 13 million barrels of oil a day (see above), will the addition of one million barrels of domestic production each day make a material difference?
Or is reducing gasoline consumption--which accounts for 46 pecent, or 9 million barrels per day of U.S. petroleum consumption--a far more target rich environment?
A far better and more permanent approach to addressing our petroleum vulnerability is a migration of the U.S. vehicle fleet to plug-in hybrid cars. This is because of the 80/40 rule: 80 percent of U.S. vehicles travel less than 40 miles each day. Plug-in hybrids provide the ability to substitute electricity for gasoline each day to travel this 40 miles (or less). A conversion of 50 percent of the U.S. vehicle fleet to plug-in hybrids in the next ten years could thus reduce U.S. petroleum consumption by almost 4 million barrels per day. It would also reduce owners' refueling costs from $4 dollar per gallon to less than $1 dollar per gallon (assuming a comparative base of 30 miles per gallon, 10 cents per kilowatt hour, and 3 miles per kilowatt hour). More drilling will not reduce pain at the pump, but driving cars that don't need gasoline would.
Ridiculous claim #4: "I took on the oil companies in Alaska."
Let's call this nonsense what it is: a windfall profits tax that benefitted only Alaskans.
Palin did indeed hike the tax on oil companies extracting petroleum from state lands. The "base charge" was 25 percent of the net profit when the spot price of oil was at or below $52 dollars. This percentage escalates as the price of oil increases.
The notion of a windfall profits tax is that oil companies should make a fair profit over their cost of extraction, which in Alaska is $15-$20 dollars per barrel. But producers with relatively low costs of extraction should not be allowed to keep all the profits when the global spot price for oil rises well beyond the production cost.
Thus oil companies contributed $10 billion to Alaska's budgeted revenues of $13 billion. In other words, what was bad for the rest of the U.S.--high oil prices--was good for Alaskans. Despite Palin's claims of Alaska's importance to U.S. energy security, Alaskans came first.
Now, how does Palin expect Alaska's fantasyland model of revenues and tax rebates to work in Ohio, Michigan or Pennsylvania, short of discovering a few billion barrels of oil beneath these states? Another pressing question is: does Palin agree with McCain's refusal to implement a national windfall profits tax? If she does, then she's a hypocrite. If she does not, then does she intend to revoke the tax on oil companies once she resumes her duties as Alaska's governor on November 5?
It's time to end this moose-in-the-headlights charade. As a shout-out to real energy experts, I'd match up Devilstower, A. Siegel, and even our favorite Frenchman, Jermome a Paris against Palin's energy "expertise" any day. It would be like shooting wolves from a helicopter...