Common Sense from the WSJ and VDH – Congress, Listen Up!

Today's Wall Street Journal's editorial, "$4 Gasbags," is a concentrated dose of common sense. It should be a bucket of icewater in the face for all of our posturing Representatives and Senators. Here are a few excerpts:

Anyone wondering why U.S. energy policy is so dysfunctional need only review Congress's recent antics. Members have debated ideas ranging from suing OPEC to the Senate's carbon tax-and-regulation monstrosity, to a windfall profits tax on oil companies, to new punishments for "price gouging" – everything except expanding domestic energy supplies.

Amid $135 oil, it ought to be an easy, bipartisan victory to lift the political restrictions on energy exploration and production. Record-high fuel costs are hitting consumers and business like a huge tax increase. Yet the U.S. remains one of the only countries in the world that chooses as a matter of policy to lock up its natural resources. The Chinese think we're insane and self-destructive, while the Saudis laugh all the way to the bank.

**********

While energy "independence" is an impossible dream, there's no doubt the U.S. has vast undeveloped fossil-fuel deposits. A tiny corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge contains an estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil and would be the largest producing oil field in the Northern Hemisphere. Yet the Senate blocked that development as recently as last month. The Outer Continental Shelf is estimated to contain some 86 billion barrels of oil, plus 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Yet of the shelf's 1.76 billion acres, 85% is off-limits and 97% is undeveloped.

**********

Democrats are going to have to grow up. The oil-rich areas they want to leave untouched are accessible with minimal environmental disturbance, thanks to modern technology. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flattened terminals across the Gulf of Mexico but didn't cause a single oil spill. As for anticarbon theology, oil will be indispensable over the next half-century and probably longer, like it or not. Airplanes will never fly on woodchips, and you won't be able to charge your car with a windmill for some time, if ever.

Recent weeks have seen some GOP stirrings on Capitol Hill, but John McCain has so far refused to jettison his green posturings, such as his belief in carbon caps and his animus against offshore development. A good reason for a rethink would be $4 gas. At present, it is charitable to call Mr. McCain's energy ideas incoherent, and it may cost him the election.

The indispensable Victor Davis Hanson also weighs in on the subject with "Do the Right Thing: Start Drilling!," in which he observes,

The wealthy, particularly those who are politically liberal, also like that high-priced gas translates into less burning of fossil fuels by others and will help accelerate research into alternative energies.

But what these elites don't seem to realize is that the energy policies they tend to advocate are for the present paralyzing almost everyone else in the country -- and that the truly ethical and environmental solution would require embracing positions long considered anathema to traditional liberalism.

For far too long, we've been treating the greenies like spoiled, overindulged children. Every time they throw a hissy fit, we cave in to their ever-increasing demands, no matter how unreasonable. In many cases, even the threat of a hissy fit seems to have been sufficient to cow our fearless leaders.

The situation has now deteriorated to the point that our very existence as a free nation is in peril. The only way to avoid national suicide is to tell the spoiled enviro brats to sit down and shut up, then go ahead and do what so urgently needs to be done. If John McCain is too stubborn or too stupid to see that, then he doesn't deserve to be elected president, anyway.