I've lived long enough to watch this happen before: in the 1970's when OPEC choked the supply of oil and drove the US economy into a frenzy over the cost of energy. At the time, President Carter clearly understood the threat.
This time is different. The fast rise of economies in India and China and other nations are soaking up oil inventory while production is flat-lining. Mideast nations and other oil producers are hoarding profits before the long winter to come.
Americans who imagine that it is within the power of the United States to change that equation, or as the Bush White House continues to believe, that we can drill our way out of the problem, are smoking pot.
We can't drill ourselves out of the oil problem and even if we could, we would put civilization at even greater risk from global warming.
The way forward won't happen until the Democrats have a veto-proof Congress and have taken the White House in the presidential election. That much was clear from this week's failed effort to pass new legislation to create a cap and trade market for carbon emissions. Even then, we will need far better qualities of leadership to explain to the American people the assumption of costs that the right-wing spin machine are pillorying.
Barack Obama can't find the way forward by blaming oil and the price of gasoline: and he had better start pulling his Democratic troops in line, on the subject. In Miami-Dade County, the unions have been sending out blast emails vilifying the price of gasoline that sound tired and dated before they even hit the in-box. The problem is: Democrats can't solve the cost of gasoline. In fact, the price of gasoline should fully reflect the cost of war in Iraq if we were honest.
The Republicans are already whining about the cost of adapting to climate change as being too expensive: yes it is going to be expensive. A lot more expensive, if we continue to fight for dwindling oil in the Mideast. A lot more expensive that it would have been, if our politics had responded to the need to reform energy policies; a need our trading partners and allies have integrated in their domestic policies for more than a decade.
It was sad to watch Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson appealing to oil despots in Abu Dhabi this week on behalf of the US dollar as the reserve currency-- in other words, the currency in which transactions for oil are conducted. The United States is not the only game in town, anymore, and that is largely the fault of the drunken sailors in charge of the Republican Party.
Americans who have to balance their checkbooks-- unlike the government-- are fully aware that government statistics under-report the pain in the economy caused by looting US treasure. Housing, unemployment, inflation, the cost of energy: the convergence of these threats will sweep out Republicans like a tidal wave in the Fall.
The Bush White House will be harshly judged by future generations for misreading the threats to the United States at the very moment in time when adaptation was most necessary and most critical. That is what you get with an incurious president, one whose faith is married to predetermined outcomes.
Under these circumstances, Obama is at the cross-roads of history. It is up to the American people to protect his candidacy from the reactionaries, the right-wing spin machine, and the haters. And still, Barack Obama has some explaining to do.
Don't blame the price of gasoline without explaining the deeper forces at work that have put Americans at such peril.
2 comments:
"Americans who imagine that it is within the power of the United States to change that equation, or as the Bush White House continues to believe, that we can drill our way out of the problem, are smoking pot"
Hey now - I am smoking pot as I type this, and I would never believe such a farce. Maybe those people are smoking crack.
Americans will not confront the forces that have brought us to this point because that will mean coming to terms with the fact that the vaunted American Way of Life is and always was intrinsically wasteful and unsustainable.
It will mean confronting the fact that for 50 years, we have invested most of our wealth in structures, notably the auto suburbs in which most Americans dwell, that will not work without massive imputs of energy that will no longer be available at an affordable price going forward, or at any price at some point in the future, which is probably sooner than anyone thinks.
We are heading full speed into a completely unmanageable situation, with ugly implications for our standard of life, our politics, and our civil order.
I don't know how we're going to cope, and neither do any of our politicians. Thus the deep denial and the weak attempts to temporize and bargain with the situation by hyping "alternatives" like the "hydrogen economy" (which you don't hear too much about anymore), biofuels and ethanol (which will tip this country into a famine if pursued much further), and solar and wind power (better than nothing).
Bush, of course, has been an enthusiastic cheerleader for our old,obsolete, car-centric way of life, so it's easy to single him out for blame, but we have the weight of nearly 80 years of disastrous public policy dictating every choice we make on how to live, travel, and eat. For 80 years, public policy has dictated and funded auto-centric development to the point where most citizens in most communities have no alternative. We're stuck with many tens of thousands of square miles of low-density development which it is impossible to serve by public transit or efficient distribution networks, and that's where most of our citizens live, including poorer citizens who will soon be stranded with no way to access jobs or goods at all.
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