Three pieces of information, highly related:
-- A House panel this week voted 9-6 along party lines to reject a bill to allow drilling for oil 50-200 miles off the Atlantic and gulf coasts. I don't need to tell you which party's congressmen voted which way.
-- Republican senators blocked a Democrat plan to tax windfall profits of oil companies, which are maximizing their incomes in this era of high gas prices.
-- The job approval rating of Congress by Americans is 16 percent, according to the most recepoll on the subject taken last month. That's barely more than half the dreadful rate of support for President Bush.
Are those interconnected? Oh, yeah!
What's really telling about the failure of our national "leadership" to actually lead is that we have what's turned into a huge issue, in a presidential election year, and no one is seizing the opportunity to create a common sense energy platform to put before the American people. There's been nothing but platitudes from the Obama and McCain camps. Congress' way of helping was to prevent more drilling and try to impose extra companies on the very companies that are trying to bring energy to us.
This is a heck of an opportunity for McCain or Obama to take a strong position and, instead of simply campaigning on it, taking it right to the Senate and trying to get something done. McCain, especially, has a record of taking such aggressive action. So far, all that's happened is that, months ago, McCain supported a plan to rescind the federal gas tax for the summer driving period. Obama criticized the idea and nothing ever happened. While the effect of the "gas tax vacation" would have been minor, it would have been better than nothing. Coupled with unloading a third of the strategic petroleum reserve, prices might have fallen some.
Instead, here in mid-June the price of a gallon of gas around my area is near $4.50 per gallon. While it's just an annoyance to most of us, my trucking firm-owning brother-in-law is getting wiped out and airlines are dropping like flies. Prices on just about everything are increasing because petroleum is involved in everything from product manufacturing to transportation.
An incredible political opportunity, especially when joined with the voter disaffection noted in my previous post -- and no one's seizing it. Amazing.
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Maybe a good thing to come out of this latest energy crisis is that Americans might be finally realizing that congressional inaction on energy policy has been long-term -- that the situation we're in didn't just come about overnight or by accident. Gas prices nearing $4.50 per gallon is, rather, the direct result of a combination of restrictive policies by Congress or legislative inaction.
The same thinking that brought us to this point remains alive today. The windfall profits tax has already been tried once and it resulted in lower domestic production. Plus, Exxon Mobil paid $30 billion in taxes for 2007, compared to a $40 billion profit. So the tax seems about right.
The ban on offshore drilling is also obsolete. There hasn't been a major offshore oil spill in decades now. Many drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico were damaged in Hurricane Katrina without causing spills. There's no reason why we shouldn't be drilling outside the 50-mile mark from the coast, where we can't see the rigs.
ANWAR is a dicier prospect. I'm not terribly convinced that drilling in a small part of the wildlife refuge would be an environmental hazard, but I'm also not sure that there's so much oil there that could be delivered in a reasonable amount of time to make a difference. However, environmentalists who have opposed ANWAR drilling for years run a considerable risk of having oil production brought much closer to home, like in the shale of Colorado. Demand for oil is inescapable, no matter how much you hate it. It could come down to giving up ANWAR or Colorado. If I'm faced with such a choice, it's "see you, Caribou!"
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Here's some food for thought. If Congress has completely botched energy policy, then we darn well better wake up to other issues that our national "leadership" has ignored: chief among them immigration policy and entitlements. Those other problems have languished for years, with nothing changing. We hit a crisis point on illegal immigration already. The entitlement problem will crush us soon if we don't address it now.
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If you're new to this blog, feel free to check the archives. Articles in May and January have other thoughts on oil prices, including reasons why the prices are so high and what the next president can do to solve the problem.
