A week from Monday marks the fourth anniversary of the introduction of the Cheney-Bush Energy Plan - the oligarchs' plan, the OP for short.
Unfortunately, the reason the OP's transformation into a document for Dubyanocchio's signature hasn't yet managed to secure a majority in the U.S. Senate has little to do with the inadequate wisdom displayed by the administration regarding America's energy future. Rather, the obstacle comes from disagreement between the House and Senate on how to handle manufacturer liability for the toxic gasoline additive MTBE. If a compromise can be reached on MTBE, then Approved! will be stamped on wretched legislation that employs the same myopic approach the government has taken since Ronald Reagan slashed the best parts of Jimmy Carter's energy program and left the worst intact.
As anybody who's been engaged even peripherally in the discussion knows, finding blueprints for a decent national energy plan requires scarcely any exertion. The Natural Resources Defense Council has one, and so do the folks at the National Energy Policy Initiative, the Apollo Alliance and the Wilderness Society. The American Council for Energy Efficient Economy has put together a smart energy strategy that stresses using state as energy laboratories and some states are promising to do just that. The Danes and the Germans have good plans. Denmark proposes to have 79% of its electrical power supplied by renewable sources 25 years from now. And, although it isn't exactly a plan, I'm still enamored of Steven Silberman's 2001 piece in Wired - The Energy Web , one of the most far-sighted perspectives on redoing energy that I've read anywhere.
Here at Daily Kos,
Jerome a Paris gives us
good ideas to insert into a sane energy policy practically every day.
Devilstower is frequently on the case as well, including this
sweet little takedown of the OP.
Stirling Newberry presented a thought-provoking
sustainability energy plan. (Centuries ago in Internet time - October 2003 - I did
my own three-part deconstruction of the Cheney-Bush plan.)
Additionally, others here have chimed in with their own takes. Environmentalist needled the energy bill, dhonig and Dem in Knoxville addressed Democratic strategy, swampfoot challenged the conventional left wisdom on nuclear power, and SW took another look at the meaning of the end of cheap oil.
The OP isn't totally devoid of worthwhile approaches. But its overall impact ought to make it an easy thumbs-down for any future-oriented Congressperson. I don't mean the future of gasoline prices next summer but rather the future when today's 21-year-olds have kids in college.
Although "peak oil" probably grabs Tom DeLay the same way the ozone hole or global warming do - as junk science - anybody who pays even cursory attention knows that oil isn't infinite. Oil men have long known this when it came to individual wells; after all, they invented oil-depletion tax deductions. As recently as five years ago, however, the conventional wisdom in the industry and its auxiliaries was that global peak oil was many decades, if not a century, away.
Now some people think global peak oil has already arrived, some think it's just around the corner, some buy the optimists' view that it won't happen until 2030 or '40. Some fear the consequences of what they believe will be an inevitable pinch, including wars that will make Iraq seem like an amusement park ride. Others think the arrival of peak oil won't matter because the unhindered free market will generate new technology that will replace increasingly expensive oil and we'll all be as happy as clams at high tide for generations to come. And still others think that the fallout will be massive and the survivors will be the better for it on an earth with one or two billion human inhabitants instead of the current six. They, of course, see themselves as survivors.
As is obvious from Diaries and their comments as well as the other sources linked above, when you get past critiquing the OP and into the details of what should comprise leftist, liberal or Democratic energy policies, we find ourselves of mixed minds. I've got my own pet notions for both the short term and the long term, and I'm supremely skeptical of anyone who presents [insert favorite technology or lifestyle change here] as the energy solution. In my view, it's the mostly one-dimensional energy approach taken by our leaders over the past quarter-century that has put us on the brink of severe consequences. I'm leery of signing on to another one-technique-fits-all proposal, no matter how jazzy it may seem. Diversity seems to me crucial.
But all our talk about what a sane national energy policy should be is about as useful for the moment as trying to corral farts to run the power grid. Chances are, with a new Senate majority, we're going lose this round in the debate. We're going to be stuck with an energy monstrosity for three-and-a-half years. Just tag that on to the 25 years of lousy policy we've already endured. We can work on policy at the state and local levels, but there's no chance that Dubyanocchio's Washington will, for example, adopt one of my favored approaches - entirely and rapidly switching the federal fleets over to high-mileage vehicles (hybrids or others).
In no way do I wish to suggest that personal behavior is an adequate substitute for reasonable government policy. Some people will scrape grease off restaurant grills to fuel their cars, but most of us can't. Subsidies that make it easier for fossil-fuel companies to continue the same-old, same-old make it tougher for people to become more earth-friendly. Not everybody lives in a dwelling where solar cells are an option.
Nonetheless, if the rest of the Second Term is - please let it be so - an interregnum before another Democrat steps into the White House, it's worth looking into what we can do personally when it comes to consuming energy. And what we are doing. The connection between driving Hummers at home and driving Humvees elsewhere intersects with personal responsibility as well as government policy. I raised this issue in the broader environmental aspect on Earth Day in this essay, but I'd like to hear how Kosopotamians handle their own energy consumption.
Lest anyone misconstrue me as preachy, let it be known that we're not saints at our house. We added insulation and some double-paned glass when we moved in 14 years ago. We don't have air conditioning, and we don't plan on adding it. We don't turn the furnace on until the temperature is 55 degrees - we wear sweaters until then. We've put compact fluorescent bulbs in as many fixtures as will accept them. (Thankfully, these have improved markedly in the past decade.) We ride public transportation when it will take us where we need to go on time. And we ride bikes for neighborhood shopping trips (not for commuting).
On the other hand, we don't have solar cells or hot-water panels on our roof, we own two older Volvos that don't get much better mileage than the smaller SUVs (we've vowed to go biodiesel or hybrid when we buy our next car) and, although our diet contains as much organic food as we can find, much of what we eat has been imported over long distances using fossil fuel or grown with water pumped expensively into regions not really suited for it.
What about you?
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