I'm sure this has already been posted by now, but for those of you who don't constantly hound this site for news digging...the Senate just approved ANWR with a ban on exportation of the oil found.
http://www.cnn.com/...
My question for Dems...why didn't you attach an amendment requiring a dollar for dollar tax on exploration that requires R&D for alternative fuel?
Practically, I'm sure very few Americans give a shit about ANWR. While we like to tell our friends that we're environmentalists, when it comes time to vote or pay for gas at the pump...well, let's just say that that self-descriptor is lost on most of us.
So while I AM AN ENVIRONMENTALIST, I can also understand why other issues rank higher on the list to many of my fellow citizens. And I think we should be pragmatic about approaching people and informing them of the importance of our issues.
ANWR preservation should be able to sell itself to the public. The only reason EXXON and it's $9.8BILLION dollar QUARTERLY profit is sending the next Valdez up there right now is because DEMOCRATS HAVE DONE A POOR JOB OF PLAYING THE ISSUE.
When all people hear about is our foreign dependence on oil and constantly have that dependence reinforced negatively at the pump, outright public opposition to such an environmental debacle is going to be minimal. So while many of you will be able to cite polls that tell us the majority of Americans oppose ANWR exploration, we all know what those polls mean. NOTHING. Because Americans, by and large, don't vote on environmental issues.
What we should have been doing all along is attaching practical and long term solution requirements to this disaster of a bill. While I agree that the prohibition on exploration actually makes sense, I think that, given our current state of gas prices, a very strong and cohesive argument could have been made for requiring energy alternative R&D spending in return for the right to move into ANWR.
There are people out there with far more policy knowledge in this area than me, but it just seems that what we should have been doing (when we knew that this bill would eventually pass anyway), was fighting for ways to make exploration SO COSTLY that no one would have entered the market. And if they did, well then the rest of us would at least see some real $$ spent on important research into other technologies down the road.
*rant over**
