Brad Warthen's Blog

Do we REALLY need people to be making RVs?

Yesterday, Mayor Bob Coble of Columbia said President Obama either had been, or would be, invited to address the National Hydrogen Association’s annual conference here in April. The mayor said, rightly, that such would be a great opportunity for the president to demonstrate his seriousness about the "green economy" and energy independence.

I heard the mayor say that yesterday afternoon.

So imagine my surprise to see that the president's first high-profile road trip beyond the Beltway (or one of the first; I'm not really keeping score) was to Elkhart, Indiana, which is suffering double-digit unemployment because.... well, because people aren't buying so many Recreational Vehicles these days.

Now, I consider it to be a BAD thing that all those people are out of work. But as the author of the Energy Party Manifesto, I have to say it's a GOOD thing, in the grand scheme and all that, that fewer people are buying RVs... In other words, I'd like to see all those good people of Elkhart working at good jobs doing something else.

One would think, given the things that he says about green technologies and energy independence, that Obama would think that, too. So I have to puzzle over the choice of Elkhart as a place to go campaign for his stimulus plan that is all about putting people to work AND protecting the environment and making us more energy-independent. It's just an odd setting. I mean, why not choose another town that's hurting, only from people losing their jobs building tubines for windmill farms or something, or printing Bibles or doing something else virtuous.

Obama's speechwriter seems to have been aware of this, so while he empathized with folks and promised jobs, he did NOT promise them jobs making RVs. Nor did he mention, specifically, that they needed to be something OTHER than making RVs, for the good of the country and their own economic future. He finessed it.

But he wouldn't have had to finesse it if he'd just made the speech somewhere else.

It's not a scientific fact that peas and carrots go well together

For some time, I've gotten these regular e-mails called "Peas and Carrots Reports" from a South Carolina-oriented group called "Citizens for Sound Conservation." (Get it? Citizens for S.C.? I assume that's intentional.)

I've never had time really to look into what sort of group this is, or even read these reports, but I gather that it's one of those groups whose philosophy can be summed up as "Protecting the environment is great and all, but let's not get carried away." You know -- we can have all the growth we want without really seriously hurting the environment. Which I don't necessarily disagree with, although I find that folks who start from that proposition generally drift more and more toward the growth, and farther and farther from the environmental protection.

No, what has vaguely bothered me about these reports is the "Peas and Carrots" part. It apparently arises from what I take to be the group's motto, "Because growth and protection go together -- just like peas and carrots." The irritating thing about this to me is that I always thought the line was dumb when Forrest Gump said it, and I'm pretty sure it was meant to sound dumb, Mr. Gump being, you know, the way he was. Sort of an endearingly goofy thing to say. It was sort of meant to suggest that since peas and carrots were often packaged together and (I guess) his mama served them to him that way, he thought there was some sort of inherent connection. But there isn't, not really. Root vegetable and legume, green and orange -- not a whole lot of similarities that I can see. And personally, I never thought they tasted good together. At best, an odd combo.

Anyway, that's about as far as my analysis of these reports had gone until the one I got today, which said the following (the boldfaced emphasis is mine):

    Despite the near 24-7 coverage focusing on how cool President Obama is and how his wife has already become a fashion icon, there was a good bit of news on the environmental front.  First, it’s becoming more and more apparent that Americans are skeptical of global warming – which means any state and federal policies being based upon that theory must be re-evaluated.  Second, while the causes of climate change continue to be debated our dependence on fossil fuels remains strong.  As such, support for more offshore exploration for oil and natural gas continues to grow.  And last, the private sector continues to embrace and transition into a more green economy – but government doesn’t need to overstep its bounds.  That’s the big question for 2009.

Come again? You say polls show that the propaganda campaign to cast doubt on global warming has gained some traction, so since more Americans doubt the science on this, we should change our policies?

Say what? Does that mean that if a majority of Americans comes to believe that the Earth is flat and you'll fall off if you go too far, the U.S. Navy should stay in the Western Hemisphere. (Yeah, some of our isolationists would love that, but it would still be nuts.)

I tend to get impatient with liberals who rant about how policies should be based in sound science and nothing else. Not that I've got anything against science, but because their real point is that our policies in no way should be based in deeply held values (specifically, religion-based values). Take that far enough, and you get eugenics or something equally horrible and "scientific." So when Obama said "We will restore science to its rightful place," I winced, because I know among Democrats that's code for "We'll do stem cell research whether you think it's morally right or not." That made it my second least-favorite part of a speech that on the whole I liked a lot.

But the idea that we should reverse policies meant to protect the Earth (not that we have many such policies to any serious extent) because a poll shows the average person doubts the science (never mind what the doubt is based in) is crazy.

Our republic is based in the notion that our elected representatives study issues and become more knowledgable about them than the average poll respondent. It too seldom works that way as things stand, with the ubiquity of polling and other pressures on elected officials to do the popular thing whether it's the right thing or not. This takes it to an absurd degree.

As to the larger point: Doubt is cast on global warming by people who simply do not want to do what it would take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I have gathered that they would not want to do it whatever the science is, and therefore they have resolved not to believe the science, and to cling to anything that might cast doubt on it.

I have a very different attitude: The way I look at it, even if there were only a 10 percent chance that our emissions were causing global warming, and that that was a bad thing, I say why the hell not reduce our emissions -- especially since there are so many other good reasons (such as our strategic position in the world) to burn less gasoline, and to move past coal to nuclear, and all that other good Energy Party stuff.

And yeah, the fact that it MIGHT help the planet is an additional reason to do things that ought to be common sense.

Here's the thing -- I'm pretty much open to any good argument. And I'm concerned enough about economic development that I still haven't made my mind up about that new coal-fired plant proposed for the Pee Dee.

Some actual GOOD news about the U.S. auto industry

I'm not up to posting a lot of commentary on it, but I didn't want to let the day pass without noting this positive development, from an Energy Party point of view:

Fourteen U.S. technology companies are joining forces and seeking $1 billion in federal aid to build a plant to make advanced batteries for electric cars, in a bid to catch up to Asian rivals that are far ahead of the U.S.

The effort, the latest pitch from corporate America to inject federal dollars into a project, is similar to an alliance that two decades ago helped the U.S. computer-chip industry restore its competitiveness. Participants include 3M Corp. and Johnson Controls Inc.

Many experts believe battery technology and manufacturing capacity could become as strategically important as oil is today. Auto makers, including General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co., say they plan to roll out plug-in electric cars by 2010. But the U.S. has limited capacity to make the lithium-ion batteries those cars will need. Asian producers such as Panasonic Corp. dominate the car-battery field.

About time we got off our duffs on this. That could be a decent thing to spend federal dollars on, rather than more of the same...

Blinded by ideology

Just to show you the difference from an UnParty approach and an ideological one, take a look at The Wall Street Journal's editorial on the Detroit bailout, and compare it to ours.

Both of us are against the bailout. So we agree, right? Not quite. It seems that the one thing that bugs the WSJ the most about the deal is the possibility that maybe, just maybe, it might force Detroit to make sensible cars for a change. And that, to the libertarian extremists at the Journal, would be like taking the country to Room 101 -- in other words, it would be the worst thing in the world:

It's also becoming increasingly clear that the real goal of Democrats isn't to save jobs per se, but to tell Detroit what cars to make and how to make them. The goal is to turn GM and the rest into Big Green Machines that will stop making SUVs and trucks and start making small cars that run on something other than carbon fuel. If consumers don't want to drive them, well, the next step will be to impose subsidies or penalties and taxes to coerce them to do so. Giving the federal government an equity stake could also lead to protectionism, as the politicians attempt to shield Detroit's mismanaged assets from competition by citing the interests of the UAW, the environment, or some other "social" good that has nothing to do with making cars Americans will want to drive.

Here's what's wrong with that -- or one of the things wrong with it: As I've made clear, I'm against the bailout. But if there IS a bailout, provisions requiring Detroit to build cars that move us toward energy independence and maybe, just maybe, reduce greenhouse gases would be a GOOD thing about deal, not a bad one.

Moreover, if we the taxpayers are putting up the money -- which, we shouldn't, but if we are -- we have EVERY RIGHT in the universe to demand that Detroit make whatever kinds cars we demand. If we want them all to be purple and green two-tone three-wheelers that run on moonbeams, that by God is the kind of cars the recipients of OUR money ought to get. If the market demands some other kind of car, then the car companies that aren't taking our frickin' money can make them.

Of course, I also believe -- as the founder of the Energy Party -- that there would be absolutely nothing wrong with making it illegal to sell those idiotic land yachts that Americans have been driving for the past decade or so. SUVs are contrary to the national interest -- strategically and environmentally -- and I am utterly unmoved by anyone's argument that they should be allowed to help fund the next bin Laden to come out of Saudi Arabia's madrassas just because -- and this infantile "reason" is offensive to me in the extreme -- they WANT to.

Of course, the God-given right to fund petrodictators -- helping Mahmoud buy the Bomb, for instance -- while at the same time destroying the planet, for no better reason than some moronic desire to loom over the rest of traffic in a vehicle that can carry 8 times as many people as it ever actually carries, is of SUPREME IMPORTANCE to the editors of the WSJ. Nothing is more sacred. One gets the impression that if someone came up with a foolproof plan to capture bin Laden, neutralize the Taliban, stabilize Pakistan, turn our economy around 180 degrees, end man-made global climate change and make everyone in America a millionaire (without the currency losing value, mind you), the WSJ would be against it if it also included a requirement that CAFE standards rise.

The Obama-McCain meeting

Not a lot to emerge from the president-elect's meeting with John McCain (and Lindsey Graham and Rahm Emanuel) today, which is to be expected. Here's the closest thing to substance I've seen, from their joint communique:

We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and protecting our nation’s security.

Of those items, seems to me the greatest potential for collaboration would be on energy. (But I would think that, wouldn't I?)

Here's a scene-setter from the NYT politics blog:

Senator John McCain and President-elect Barack Obama are sitting down together now and metaphorically smoking a peace pipe in their first face-to-face session since the bruising campaign.

The two are meeting at Mr. Obama’s transition headquarters at a federal building in Chicago, where they just posed for the cameras.

The meeting space has a stagey look, in front of the kind of thick royal blue curtain you see in an auditorium, not the usual campaign-rigged blue backdrop. Flags are strewn throughout, with one planted between the two principals, who are sitting in yellow, Oval-Office-like chairs.

To their sides are their wingmen, Rahm Emanuel on Mr. Obama’s left and Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina on Mr. McCain’s right.

They’re all looking jolly (Mr. Obama and Mr. Emanual the jolliest), and we’ll soon get a read-out on the discussion.

The Obama team is hoping they can smooth any ruffled feathers and build an alliance with the old John McCain — not the one whom the Obama camp called “erratic” during the presidential campaign but the self-styled “maverick” who worked across party lines for various causes that Mr. Obama wants to advance — global warming, immigration, earmark spending among them.

In the brief moment before the cameras, Mr. Obama said: “We’re going to have a good conversation about how we can do some work together to fix up the country, and also to offer thanks to Senator McCain for the outstanding service he’s already rendered.”

Mr. McCain was asked whether he would help Mr. Obama with his administration.

“Obviously,” he said.

Those pesky reporters tried to shout out other queries, like about a possible bail-out for the auto industry, but the pool report says they were “shouted down by the pool sherpas,” and that “Mr. Obama finally said with a smile, ‘You’re incorrigible.’”

The last in-person meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain took place more than a month ago, at the third and final presidential debate at Hofstra, remembered chiefly as the coming-out party for Joe the Plumber.

Updated | 2:12 p.m.: A joint statement was released from President-elect Barack Obama and Senator John McCain:

“At this defining moment in history, we believe that Americans of all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the bad habits of Washington so that we can solve the common and urgent challenges of our time. It is in this spirit that we had a productive conversation today about the need to launch a new era of reform where we take on government waste and bitter partisanship in Washington in order to restore trust in government, and bring back prosperity and opportunity for every hardworking American family. We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and protecting our nation’s security.”

Beyond that, here are versions of the story from:

• The Associated Press (on thestate.com)
• The Chicago Tribune
• The Wall Street Journal (really just an update of their story from this morning's paper)
• The New York Times

How Detroit got to where it is now

Earlier today I wrote an editorial for tomorrow's paper that warns against being too eager to give Detroit the means to keep doing what it's been doing, as some in Congress seem to want to do.

My reading prior to writing that led to my post about cheap gas, and in responding to a comment on that, I was reminded of something Tom Friedman wrote the other day:

O.K., now that I have all that off my chest, what do we do? I am as terrified as anyone of the domino effect on industry and workers if G.M. were to collapse. But if we are going to use taxpayer money to rescue Detroit, then it should be done along the lines proposed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday by Paul Ingrassia, a former Detroit bureau chief for that paper.

“In return for any direct government aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers, closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company ... Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.”

That, in turn, reminded me of something else Paul Ingrassia wrote recently, and that's what this post is about. Basically, I wanted to recommend his primer, "How Detroit Drove Into a Ditch," which is a nice reminder of everything the Detroit Three (formerly the "Big Three") and the UAW did to mess up the auto industry in this country.

Energy Party's worst nightmare: gas at $1.87

You may think it's the Republicans who were the big losers last week, but you'd be wrong. It was the Energy Party.

I realized how awful things were last night as I passed the gas stations on the way home. Hess was at $1.879.

Folks, that's the same as less than 30 cents a gallon back when I started driving in 1968. Which is less than we were paying then. And when I think of the 1968 Buick LeSabre I used to drive (before I bought my Vega, which was really a mistake), and the mileage it got, it sends a chill to the heart.

Even I, Energy Party stalwart that I am, thought about stopping to buy some of that cheap gas, even though I had plenty in my tank.

So now everybody's going to start buying SUVs again (which of course will create upward pressure on the gas price, but we never learn), and Obama's going to make sure we don't drill in Utah or wherever, and Congress wants to bail out Detroit (or perhaps we should say, it wants to bail out the UAW), whether it gets its act together or not.

As The New York Times noted on Election Day,

Just a few weeks ago, the Big Three American automakers convinced Congress to give them $25 billion in cheap loans to retool their plants to make fuel-efficient cars. Then, with nary a blush, the Ford Motor Company introduced the new star in its line: the 2009, 3-ton, 16-miles-per-gallon, F-150 pickup.

Lord help us, because we won't help ourselves.

Just to review, here's what we should do, and are not going to do:

• Impose a tax increase to get the pump price of gasoline back closer to $4, so the money stays in this country, and demand is curtailed, thereby driving down world prices, thereby putting more money in our national coffers for hydrogen research, developing electric cars, paying for the War on Terror, credit bailouts, a National Health Plan, and all the other stuff we can't actually afford now.
• Produce more of our oil domestically, whether it's off-shore, in Utah, in Alaska, wherever -- for as long as we continue to need the stuff, which will be for quite a while.
• Put all the resources we can muster into an Apollo/Manhattan Project to make our need for oil a thing of the past ASAP. How will we pay for it? I just told you.
• Use "stimulus" funds to build mass transit, nuclear plants and other critical energy infrastructure, rather than throwing the money to the winds the way we did with the earlier stimulus program.
• Do all the other stuff in the Energy Party Manifesto.

There. I said my piece. Nobody's listening, but at least somebody said it.

Mayor Bob's update on bus funding

Just now getting to my weekend e-mails, and I see this one from Bob Coble:

I wanted to give you an update from the City County RTA Committee that met at City Hall last Thursday. City Council members include me, EW Cromartie, and Kirkman Finlay. Belinda Gergel also joined us. County Council members include Damon Jeter, Val Hutchinson, and Joyce Dickerson. Chairman Joe McEachern also attended. The Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce and other groups also were in attendance. The first meeting had four presentations from staff on a variety of background issues. Joe Cronin of the County gave an excellent overview of how our RTA compares to peer cities. I believe that all the Committee members strongly agree on two fundamental points. First that transit is an essential public service that is critical for those who depend on bus service to get to their job and the doctor; an essential environmental tool to prevent non-attainment status and become a green community; and is vital to continuing economic development. Secondly, that the County and the City have the capacity to provide funding currently and it would be unacceptable not to do so.

Frannie Heizer, as the attorney for the RTA, presented the current legal options for funding. She made the following points: First, a sales tax referendum could not be held until November 2010 (Richland County Council could call the referendum now for 2010). Secondly, Frannie believes that the use of hospitality tax for transit would require a change of state law in the 2009 Legislative Session. The County has asked for an Attorney General’s Opinion to see if hospitality tax could be used now without a change in state law. Thirdly, neither City nor County property tax can be used without a referendum and then property tax would be limited by the cap on milage. Fourth, the mass transit fee by the County and the vehicle registration fee by the City and County are available now (both fees are different legally but to the taxpayer are paid in the same way and the same amount). 

When we establish a funding plan, other issues that were discussed included the need for other governments and partners to participate in funding the RTA; doing a comprehensive operations analysis; and changing the RTA organizational structure to have advisory members for those governments that are not providing money to the system.

The next meeting will be Friday November 14th at 9:30 am at the RTA headquarters on Lucius Road. We are inviting three members from the Lexington County Council to participate.

Thanks. I will keep you updated.

Who'll resurrect the electric car? Chrysler says IT will

Just as everyone is ready to write off Detroit, Chrysler (of all companies) tells the WSJ that it's going to have a fleet -- "portfolio" is the term it used, actually -- of electric cars and trucks year after next:

Chrysler LLC is aiming to launch a full "portfolio" of electric cars and trucks, and sports-utility vehicles starting in late 2010, a person familiar with the company's plans said.

The lineup will include front-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive cars as well as so-called "body-on-frame" trucks, this person said.

At least one of the models will be a pure electric vehicle with a rechargable battery pack that Chrysler expects to have a range of 150 to 200 miles, this person said.

Others will have a battery that can last for about 40 miles and a small gasoline engine to provide power and recharge the battery for longer trips.

Chrysler expects these "range-extended" electric vehicles to go about 400 miles on eight gallons of gasoline, this person said....

I'm guessing that there will be a great deal of interest in this "portfolio" if it materializes. After all, my video short "Who Resurrected the Electric Car?" is my second-most watched video EVER on YouTube, with 27,748 views. (Which is first? Don't ask. What that says about America is more disturbing, and a subject for another day.)

When I saw this breaking news on my Treo this morning, I thought it particularly ironic in light of the three letters to the editor I read in that same paper this morning, trashing Detroit all the way around for failing to do such things as this. I agreed with the letter writers, by the way.

I'll believe Chrysler can pull this off when it does so. But the news is encouraging, from an Energy Party perspective.

The run on gas stations: Will banks be next?

Thursday evening one of my daughters called me; she was over at USC studying, and wanted to know if she should run out and get some gas for her aged car (which doesn't get the best mileage). She had been told that it would go up to $5 a gallon by midnight.

I told her not to worry about it (she had half a tank). We were all just going to have to get used to higher gas prices, because they're only going to keep ratcheting up. Getting a few gallons at a lower price this once wasn't going to make a noticeable difference in the long run.

On the way home that night, I saw the queues of cars out into the streets. Of course, those twits -- the hoarders -- are the reason some stations are out today. Looks like some of us will be carpooling for the next week or so, which is not a bad thing (from an Energy Party perspective), just irritating.

But a run on the gas stations is one thing. Will the banks be next, in this pessimistic environment? I saw this in the WSJ this morning:

The crisis gripping the nation's financial system deepened, with Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. racing to sell itself over the weekend and other major U.S. institutions scrambling to show they have the financial wherewithal to ride out the crisis.

Potential buyers of Lehman were heading toward a standoff with federal officials Friday. Firms weighing offers for the battered investment bank sought financial assistance, while Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has been unwilling to support a government-led bailout, people familiar with the situation say. The weekend's negotiations over Lehman's fate could define the next chapter of the government's handling of the crisis.

Friday's unease spread beyond Lehman. Shares of American International Group Inc., the giant insurer, fell more than 30%. Standard & Poor's said it might lower its credit ratings on AIG because of its tumbling share price and the increasing yield on its debt instruments compared with safe government Treasurys. (See related article.)

Now I don't care much about Lehman; I don't know what it is any more than I understand the Bear Stearns thing. But that "spreading crisis" talk seems to me a cause for concern.

How much 55 mph could save us

Ran into Samuel this morning and he gave me a break -- he didn't ask me if I had read the book yet. But he did, of course, get onto 55 mph, and he started throwing a bunch of numbers at me, and I meant to ask him to e-mail his numbers to me, but forgot, but that's OK because when I got to the office I found that he had already sent me the numbers, over the weekend. To wit:

If we had a 55mph which Chevron says we save 22 Billion Gallons of Gas which is 524 million barrels of oil on an annual basis, here is what you get  a drop in the price of oil of at least $ 15 to $20 dollars a barrel, the dollar's value improves and the price fall further and then the speculators see that this is not there ballgame anymore  and it falls further and so the thugocracies start seeing their boondoggles shrink and Putin , Ahmadinajad and others find out they are no longer awash in petrodollars and remember Europe is facing a slow down now and even in China  it is slowing down so now we need to go for efficiency and energy security so we can make the jump to other fuels for transportation. Now the other big factor here is inflation and if we did this we would hit it with a big bat  and slow it down significantly which then brings all  things down. Now we  cannot let out domestic retail price slip below $ 2.50 a gallon so we  need to set a floor that if the prices dips , it is taxed to fund alternative fuels , low-carbon , non-carbon, wind , solar. There are answers , but not from Washington. Are you the one ? Will you lead ? Are you related to Thomas Paine ,Thomas Jefferson, & Abigal Adams It is time for the ONES to emerge. We need new Founding Leadership.This country needs action ! Are you the ONE ?????????

As Samuel said to me this morning, "That's the word, 'Thugocracy.'" And he's right. Why does Putin think he can get away with this stuff in Georgia? Because he can. And why can he? Because of the oil and gas.

Anyway, before he got away, I got Samuel to agree with me that we should do 55 AND drill, thereby reasserting the essential Energy Party organizing principle: Do Everything. Only then can we make the thugs feel it.

Note that at the end of his missive Samuel was expressing his frustration at the lack of leadership. Amen to that. He says he's about had it with all of 'em -- Democrats as well as Republicans. Of course, I've been there for some time.

Krauthammer strikes blow for Energy Party

Only this morning did I remember something I meant to call to your attention Sunday: Charles Krauthammer's column espousing the central tenet of the Energy Party, which is: When it comes to Energy, Do Everything.

An excerpt:

    But forget the math. Why is this issue either/or? Who’s against properly inflated tires? Let’s start a national campaign, Cuban-style, with giant venceremos posters lining the highways. (“Inflate your tires. Victory or death!”) Why must there be a choice between encouraging conservation and increasing supply? The logical answer is obvious: Do both.
    Do everything. Wind and solar. A tire gauge in every mailbox. Hell, a team of oxen for every family (to pull their gasoline-drained SUVs). The consensus in the country, logically unassailable and politically unbeatable, is to do everything possible to both increase supply and reduce demand, because we have a problem that’s been killing our economy and threatening our national security. And no one measure is sufficient.

How is it that the major political parties are getting away with their usual ideological garbage on Energy in this election -- the Democrats refusing to produce, the Republicans refusing to conserve. It is patently obvious to anyone possessed of common sense that -- in this particular economic, political and global moment especially -- our one hope is to Do It All?

Are you a locavore?

Emile DeFelice, sometime contributor to this blog, said it this way: "Put Your State On Your Plate."

Hugh Weathers, the man who beat Emile to remain state agriculture commissioner, has a more succinct way of putting it: The word, he says, is "locavore."

Read about the concept, and what South Carolina is doing to promote it, in Mr. Weathers' op-ed piece today, if you haven't read it already. Then take the challenge -- eat local for a day.

Then, do it again.

However we pay for it, we all need a better transit system

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

On Wednesday, my truck was in the shop. This sort of situation may mean slightly different things to different people. Here’s what it meant to me:

Wednesday morning, I needed a way to get from home — out west of West Columbia — to work, if for no other reason than I needed the paycheck to pay for getting my truck fixed.

Fortunately, my eldest daughter was staying at our house with her children — her husband is remodeling their home — and she works downtown. So she drove me way south of downtown to my office, before turning around and going back to her office.

(My wife couldn’t take me because she had my daughter’s six-month-old twins, and her car isn’t set up to accommodate the Apollo-capsule-type arrangements that they call baby carseats these days.)

From that point, I was stuck. I knew I was going to have to stay late at the office that night — later than anyone in my department — because I was going to be off Friday and needed to get at least a week’s worth of work done in the four days available. Besides, no one in my department lives anywhere near me. In fact, I started writing this column on Wednesday to get ahead, and as I typed this sentence at 5:23 p.m., I had no idea how I’d get home.

As it happened, my daughter got me at 8 p.m. Fortunately, she and her children had to go back into town anyway; otherwise picking me up would have involved a long round trip for somebody, with gasoline at $4 a gallon. I wasn’t quite at a stopping place when she arrived, so she waited downstairs for me with, as near as I could tell over her cell phone, at least one of the twins screaming.

Then, on Thursday morning, my truck still wasn’t ready. So we improvised a whole new plan, in which I drove my wife’s car into town, and my daughter left work at midday to take her car out to my wife so that she could go to work in the afternoon. But at least I was covered in case the job required me to be somewhere else in the course of the day, which sometimes happens.

This is ridiculous, folks.

Yes, I know: Poor me. These are decidedly spoiled American, middle-class problems.

But never mind me. The truth is, if you are less fortunate, you have a harder time owning a vehicle, fixing it when it’s broken, filling it with gasoline, or paying to park it. Nor can you afford to do without that job that the vehicle would take you to.

There are many places in this country where folks don’t have these problems. I have a New York subway card in my wallet from my last trip there, which I can’t bring myself to throw away because of the wonderful thing it represents: freedom from driving and pumping gas and finding a place to park, simply ducking down a few steps, and moments later finding myself in whatever part of town that I need to be in.

In the Columbia metropolitan area, we have our own sort of mass transit system, in theory. But it isn’t fully adequate to anyone’s needs. It doesn’t go from enough places to enough places often enough, and it’s tough for someone who just needs it occasionally to find out quickly and easily how to use it.

What we need is a better transit system, but what we’re in danger of having now is a worse one, or none at all. That’s because Richland County — the one local government that’s done the most to step up to the challenge of funding said system — is going to stop stepping up in October. That’s when the vehicle tax the county levied for that purpose runs out.

Last week, the County Council ditched a plan to hold a referendum asking voters to approve a 1-cent sales tax increase to fund the buses and other transportation needs and wants. I don’t blame the council. As we said in an editorial before the action, the Legislature has jacked up our sales taxes too high already. And besides, some of the things in that transportation proposal were more wants than needs, and only in there to get people who don’t ride buses to back the proposal.

No one knows where we go from here. The County Council doesn’t know. The citizens group that put together the plan the council rejected doesn’t know.

And just in case we got the notion that the city of Columbia would be taking up the slack, I got a preemptive call from Mayor Bob Coble Thursday morning to tell me that the options range from few to none. (While the mayor didn’t say so, that’s largely thanks to the Legislature’s tireless efforts to make sure local governments can’t pay for any local need that they aren’t paying for already.)

About the only person offering new ideas last week was regular contributor “bud” on my blog, who suggested using the city’s and county’s shares of the “hospitality tax,” a lot of which currently goes for things a whole lot less essential than a mass transit system.

As I write this, I don’t know what the best way to pay for a better transit system might be. What I do know is that Midlands governments need to find a way, for the sake of:

• Those who have no other way to get to work now.
• Those of us who would like a better way to work than we have now (and sometimes need one).
• Those “knowledge workers” who are supposed to make the planned Innovista work, and who have the option of working instead in a community where it’s easier, and cheaper, and cleaner to get around.

For more, visit my blog at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Driving slower

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
            -- the late George Carlin

When I drove to Memphis a couple of weeks ago, I did a new thing -- I drove under the de jure speed limit. Normally, I do what most people do, stay under the de facto limit -- staying carefully under a speed that is 10 mph over the limit.

This change on my part wasn't due to some newfound respect for the law. We know that here in the United States, no state actually means for us to drive below the stated speed. If they did, the police would stop and ticket us for exceeding it. We all know that a trooper will sit right there and watch you go by if you're doing 78 in a 70 zone, for instance. But go 85, and he'll get you. (One exception to this may be the Mississippi patrolmen, who are apparently too busy speeding themselves to notice anyone else doing it.)

Nor was I doing it to help fight the War on Terror. I agree with Samuel Tenenbaum that we should lower the limit to 55 and enforce it, but in the meantime, driving that much slower than the surrounding traffic is not only unsafe, but will not have a sufficiently measurable impact on energy independence to make taking your life in your hands worth it. We've all got to do it for it to help.

No, I drove below the limit because my family was packed into three cars, and one of those contained my wife and daughter and the six-month-old twins, and they had to stop frequently. My wife said it made her nervous to try to stay within sight of each other, so I went on ahead, but tried not to get too far ahead.

And you know what? I kind of liked it. It was ... more relaxing.

Anyway, when I was getting ready for this trip, I ran into Samuel, and he said "Drive 55!" And I said I didn't think I could do that, because I had to drive to Pennsylvania, pack my daughter's belongings into my truck, drive back from Pennsylvania with all the stuff, and unload it at the place where she's going to be living back in South Carolina, all between Friday morning and Monday afternoon. But I did promise to stay below the posted limits. "But that means you'll be driving 70!" Actually, no, I assured him -- since so much of the trip is in Virginia (limit 65), and the limit in PA is 65 or 55, and the small bit of Maryland is 65 or 60 (around Hagerstown), and the first 50 miles of North Carolina is 60, my average would be far below 70.

So I did it yesterday, and the results were good.

I drive a 2000 Ford Ranger. And for those of you who wonder why the founder of the Energy Party doesn't drive a Prius, consider three things:

I can't afford a Prius. I don't foresee a time anywhere in the near future when I will be able to afford a Prius.

I am the designated truck owner in the family -- my large, extended family. No one closely related to me owns a large, truck-type vehicle of any kind -- certainly no SUVs, I'm happy to say. Whenever one of my 20-something children has to move from one apartment to another, or building materials are needed, or an attic full of stuff has to be hauled either to Goodwill or the dump or whatever, I'm the guy; I've got the truck.

I've done everything I can to be responsible about this truck-ownership thing. I went out of my way to find a 4-cylinder, manual transmission. (What this means is that I'm not only the designated truck owner, but the designated truck driver, since no one else has confidence with the manual shift, and I prefer to drive my own truck anyway.)

This brings up an ironic digression. We looked into renting a truck for moving my daughter from PA. It was going to cost more than $700 -- we tried several vendors -- plus the cost of renting a car to get up there. So we decided to give away a lot of her stuff -- my daughter's fine with that -- and haul back only what I could get onto my Ranger. (To get your mind around this, picture the Beverly Hillbillies, only we opted not to take a rocking chair for Granny.) But I needed new tires. So I splurged and bought (via credit card) four new tires. Changing the tires revealed bearings that needed repacking, the need for new tie rod ends, and original shocks that were overdue for replacement at 110,000 miles. Total: $1,450 dollars. Samuel and Jerry Whitley, who is a CPA, told me that at least I was investing it in my truck instead of wasting it on a rental. So I guess that's something. And it drives really well down, without that shimmy every time I went over the slightest irregularity in the road.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, my point: I drove under the speed limit the whole way. Normally, my truck gets about 22 mpg in town. I had never had it on the highway for an extended period before. Driving below the limit, I got 27 mpg on my first tank of gas. I refilled when we finally rolled into Carlisle, PA, last night, and I had gotten an awesome 28.7 mpg on the second tank. Not as good as the 31 or so we had done in my wife's car on the Memphis trip, but this is a truck -- and as we know, Detroit has put zero effort into making the things efficient, on account of their being exempted from CAFE standards all those years.

So I think it was worth the extra hour and a half or so it took -- or whatever. I didn't want to actually do the math, because that might make me want to hurry on the trip back. It's like a Zen thing. We left Cola at 10 a.m., stopped several times, and got to Carlisle at about 8:10 p.m.

And it was also a more relaxing drive. Once you drop the usual "Gotta get there! Gotta press the guy in front of me!" mode, your head gets into a better place. I noticed this on the Memphis trip as well.

RichCo Council agrees with us on sales tax hike

The proposal to put a local penny sales tax increase for Richland County transportation needs on the November ballot presented us with a dilemma as an editorial board. Some of the main points to consider:

• With the vehicle tax expiring in October, some way to continue funding the Midlands bus system was needed.
• The road work identified in the plan a citizen study group came up with DID identify real needs -- although the road construction, along with bike paths, etc. -- were in our minds mere sweeteners (in this plan, that is) to draw more votes for the bus funding. There is indeed a need for some road construction, and MUCH road maintenance, not only in Richland County, but across our state. That has been neglected by our Legislature, which has also refused to reform the DOT, making us reluctant to see any additional funding passed, since it would pass through such an inefficient and unaccountable agency.
• With the tax swap of last year, the Legislature has already put far too much stress on sales taxes, and too little on other mechanisms such as property and income. Another penny would exacerbate an already serious problem. It's not as bad here yet as Tennessee, but we're getting there.
• The Legislature -- see how often the Legislature is the source of problems? -- has given local governments no better options for funding local needs.
• Putting the question on the ballot is not the same thing as supporting it.

So, faced with all that and more, we noted the problems with a sales tax increase in our Tuesday editorial, although we reluctantly granted that at this point, perhaps the only way forward was to go ahead and have the referendum. Then, when it failed, the council would know it had to find another way to fund the buses.

Now that it has voted down even having the referendum (which we did not think the council would do, or I  didn't anyway), the county has reached that point even more quickly.

The best option at the moment would seem to be continuing the wheel tax, while looking for a longer-term solution to paying the county's share of operating the inadequate transit system that we have.

We may have an Energy Party candidate in Texas

You know how I'm always getting stuff about politics in other parts of the country that, in order to get through the day and pay attention to the stuff I need to pay attention to, I just automatically delete, by the gross?

Well, I stopped and backed up and undeleted one today because something caught my eye just as it was going away. It said, in part:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Noriega Charts Course for Texas, U.S. Energy Self-Sufficiency
U.S. Senate Candidate Calls Current Energy Situation Both a Short-Term Crisis and Long-Term Opportunity for Texas
Dallas – Calling our current energy situation both a “crisis and an opportunity,” U.S. Senate candidate Rick Noriega unveiled his energy plan at a press conference at Dallas City Hall this morning. Entitled “Bold Solutions for a Better Future: Energy Self-Sufficiency Now,” the Noriega energy plan is designed to provide immediate relief for Texas families; build the road to energy self-sufficiency; and develop a sustainable energy and economic future for Texas and the U.S.
    The Noriega energy plan is centered on the belief that by becoming a world leader in renewable energy, Texas will create jobs, strengthen the state’s economic base, provide a more sustainable future for state natural resources, and strengthen our national security. At the heart of the plan is the ambitious 100% in 10 effort – the goal to use entirely renewable sources for Texas household electricity needs by 2019....

This Noriega guy is apparently a Democrat, although he doesn't go on an on about it. You mostly have to pick up on that from the use of key code phrases, such as "Take Texas Back," yadda-yadda.

But hey, with an agenda like that, he might want to think about joining us in the Energy Party. Around here, the politicians of both parties just pander to our anger over gasoline prices, without proposing to do much that is substantive.

So I don't know much about this Noriega guy, but at least on this point, he's capable of thinking roughly in the right direction.

Yeah, he's real skimpy on the details -- where is this plan, by the way? -- but at least, as I say, he starts in the right direction.

What did you think of Al Gore's speech?

On tomorrow's page we'll be running a Tom Friedman piece that holds up Al Gore's speech as the kind that the actual current president of the United States ought to be making -- and the kind that an Energy Party president would certainly make. Here's how Friedman described it:

    ... If you want to know what an alternative strategy might look like, read the speech that Al Gore delivered on Thursday to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore, the alliance’s chairman, called for a 10-year plan — the same amount of time John F. Kennedy set for getting us to the moon — to shift the entire country to “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” to power our homes, factories and even transportation.
    Mr. Gore proposed dramatically improving our national electricity grid and energy efficiency, while investing massively in clean solar, wind, geothermal and carbon-sequestered coal technologies that we know can work but just need to scale. To make the shift, he called for taxing carbon and offsetting that by reducing payroll taxes: Let’s “tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said.
    Whether you agree or not with Gore’s plan, at least he has a plan for dealing with the real problem we face — a multifaceted, multigenerational energy/environment/geopolitical problem...

Me, I'm really busy trying to get pages out without Mike, which is not easy, let me tell you. But maybe y'all can go read Al's speech and tell me what you think. All I know is that what I've heard about it -- from Friedman and others who have filtered and condensed its points -- sounds good. But maybe the devil's in the details.

What do y'all think?

T. Boone Pickens' plan for energy independence

Assuming the link works for you, I invite you to go read T. Boone Pickens' piece in the WSJ today, headlined, "My Plan to Escape the Grip of Foreign Oil."

Now I know what you're thinking: Mr. Pickens being an oil man from way back, his plan for independence is likely to be as simple and monolithic as Joe Wilson's -- specifically, drill.

But while he says, way down in the piece, "Drilling in the outer continental shelf should be considered as well," it plays less of a role in his vision than it does in the Energy Party's, if that. It comes after he urges us to "explore all avenues and every energy alternative, from more R&D into batteries and fuel cells to development of solar, ethanol and biomass to more conservation."

All of that follows his exploration of his main idea, which is to convert a large portion of our energy generation to wind power, which he lauds by saying "Wind is 100% domestic, it is 100% renewable and it is 100% clean." He would use natural gas thereby freed up from power generation to run our vehicles.

All that is great, but I think the best passage in the piece is when he explains why we must take extraordinary measures to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I leave you with that excerpt:

    Let me share a few facts: Each year we import more and more oil. In 1973, the year of the infamous oil embargo, the United States imported about 24% of our oil. In 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War, this had climbed to 42%. Today, we import almost 70% of our oil.
    This is a staggering number, particularly for a country that consumes oil the way we do. The U.S. uses nearly a quarter of the world's oil, with just 4% of the population and 3% of the world's reserves. This year, we will spend almost $700 billion on imported oil, which is more than four times the annual cost of our current war in Iraq.
    In fact, if we don't do anything about this problem, over the next 10 years we will spend around $10 trillion importing foreign oil. That is $10 trillion leaving the U.S. and going to foreign nations, making it what I certainly believe will be the single largest transfer of wealth in human history...

The troubles with ethanol

One reason we need to pursue every potential avenue in trying to achieve greater energy independence (and save the planet) is that some of the things we try are going to fail. Others are going to turn out to be bad ideas. The sooner we know that, the better.

Most of us now know that about ethanol. But in case you thought that the only reason why it's a bad idea is that converting cropland to growing energy instead of food leads to famine for millions and higher food prices for everybody else (as if that weren't enough), Venkat Laksmi provided a more complete list for us today on our op-ed page. An excerpt:

    ...Ethanol is not a long hydrocarbon chain like gasoline, and as a result it is only two-thirds as efficient as gasoline. In other words, a gallon of ethanol will provide two-thirds of the energy of a gallon of gasoline. Ethanol mixes with water, which is not the case with gasoline, which means the transportation systems used for gasoline (i.e. pipelines and trucks) cannot be used for ethanol.

    Additionally, there is a lot of inefficiency in the production of ethanol. For example, corn-based ethanol requires 54 percent of the energy to process the corn into ethanol and 24 percent to grow the corn. As a result, there is a return of only 30 percent or so of the energy, making this inefficient as compared to conventional gasoline, which produces five times the energy required to produce it, and even biodiesel, with its 93 percent efficiency. Even though biodiesel is efficient, it has a long way to go for large-scale production....

Samuel notes progress on 55 mph

Samuel Tenenbaum, author of the Energy Party's 55-mph plank and ardent advocate of that idea (just ask anyone who's had a conversation with him in the last year or two), writes a hasty note to inform us of progress on that front:

Senator John Warner has asked the Energy Dept to give him info on 55. Time to write... about it again.I was interviewed on Spart. TV about 55 yesterday ! Have you read "Energy Victory " yet . This is the foremost issue of the time ! We need energy security first, not indepence for that is a long way off . Energy security means getting out of the grip of the thugocracies. 55 mph , flexfuel (M85) mandated that all cars and trucks sold here in 2010 and tax credit to excellerate the trade in of old clunkers . Like if you buy flexfuel car that gets 35 mpg then you get half the price back and have a system that decreases until you hit 26mph which then you add a  $ 1,000 per mpg below . So if I want a Rolls or Hummer , I can pay for its abuse of the planet . You still have the freedom , but it costs you !

Yes, he's still on me about the book he gave me. It's on my desk! It's on my short list of stuff to read! But right now I'm reading The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which my older son gave me for Father's Day. At least it's a related subject...

I'm up to the part where Osama and those who agree with him have just been thoroughly humiliated by the U.S. coming into the Arabian peninsula and kicking Saddam's butt out of Kuwait and back to Baghdad, thereby illustrating their country's helplessness and utter dependence on the West.

Of course, it's a symbiotic relationship -- or perhaps I should say, mutually parasitic relationship. We're just as dependent on their oil, which is the condition that Samuel and the rest of us in the Energy Party would like to change.

Charlotte's success with light rail

The Charleston paper this morning has this story about Charlotte's initial success with light rail. Note this excerpt:

The Lynx is an electric light-rail system that started running in November and quickly exceeded ridership predictions. Near many of the 15 stations along the 9.6-mile line, new condominiums and other buildings are under construction, and property values are rising fast.

Those of you who believe in the market as arbiter of all things should note that last bit: "property values are rising fast." That's the mark of success. Me, I'd call it a success if they'd just extend it out to that mess around Lake Norman and relieve it just a little, so it doesn't feel like I spend half the drive to Pennsylvania dragging through that part. You don't actually escape the gravitational pull of that hyperdense mass until you're 50 miles into North Carolina.

Hey, if Charlotte builds on this, and Charleston imitates it, can my Midlands Subway System be far behind?

I keep dreaming the dream anyway...

Energy Party: Mayor Bob says don't forget hydrogen

My latest Energy Party column has been well received, but a common complaint is that not EVERY plank of the platform was mentioned or elaborated upon. This from Mayor Bob Coble of Columbia:

Brad you should add a plank in your Energy Party Platform calling for research and production of hydrogen energy including hydrogen fuel cells. I know you wrote in your Sunday column that a higher gas tax after 9-11 could have been used to accelerate "...the development of hydrogen, solar, wind, clean coal, methanol-from-coal, electric cars, mass transit..." but alternate energy should be a major part of your platform.

On July 14th the Board of the National Hydrogen Association will meet in Columbia in preparation for their convention in March, which will bring to Columbia the international hydrogen and fuel cell industry’s largest companies.  Becoming part of the hydrogen economy is an important economic strategy for Columbia and South Carolina.  In 2008, we will build the first public hydrogen fueling station in the Southeast.  Millennium Cell, a world leader in hydrogen battery technology, is moving a subsidiary company, Gecko Technologies, to Columbia.  USC has the nation's only National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Fuel Cells.  The Savannah River National Lab and Clemson's International Center for Automotive Research are centers for hydrogen research.

Every facet of society stands to be impacted by hydrogen generated energy. A major source of global warming could disappear as well as America’s reliance on foreign oil.  Our strategy is to see that Columbia is the site for much of the commercialization of the hydrogen economy. 

Additionally, Innovista, which of course will promote a number of different areas of research, will be Columbia’s greatest opportunity to create jobs and increase our per capita income. According to a recent survey, 90% of City residents support the research campus and these efforts. The Association of University Technology Managers recently ranked USC number 11 out of 114 public universities in the number of start-up businesses created.

Finally, we are trying to connect our citizen to the knowledge economy. Over 8,000 students graduate from Columbia institutions of higher education each year.  The Columbia Talent Magnet project is designed to keep these bright minds in the Columbia region by connecting them to existing community initiatives. Also, the USC Columbia Technology Incubator has assisted 63 companies and created 554 new jobs including 142 minority and female jobs. 

The Energy Party should aggressively promote all alternate forms of energy particularly hydrogen.

Of course, hydrogen has been mentioned in earlier Energy Party documents, such as this original column. An excerpt:

Another is a Manhattan project (or Apollo Project, or insert your favorite 20th century Herculean national initiative name) to develop clean, alternative energy. South Carolina can do hydrogen, Iowa can do bio, and the politicians who will freak out about all this can supply the wind power....

Robert's great Energy Party cartoon

Over the weekend I neglected to mention (in connection with my Sunday column on the subject) Robert Ariail's wonderful cartoon of July 4, which states the Energy Party position with the same incisive relevance as the original Ben Franklin cartoon that inspired him did the cause of the Revolution.

And I didn't even put him up to it...

Neither Obama nor McCain meets Energy Party standard

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
JOHN McCAIN and Barack Obama are lucky there’s such a thing as Republicans and Democrats in this country, because neither would be able to get the Energy Party nomination.
    They’re also lucky that the Energy Party exists only in my head, because I believe its nominee could tap into a longing, among the very independent voters Messrs. McCain and Obama need to court for victory, for a pragmatic, nonideological, comprehensive national energy policy. This independent voter longs for it, anyway.
    What is the greatest failure of George W. Bush as president? If you answered “Iraq,” you lose. His greatest failure was summed up well by Sen. Joe Biden, who said at the 2006 Galivants Ferry Stump Meeting, “History will judge George Bush harshly not for the mistakes he has made... but because of the opportunities that he has squandered.”
    The biggest wasted opportunity was when he failed, on Sept. 12, 2001, to ask Americans to sacrifice, to work together to shake off “the grip of foreign oil oligarchs,” and “plan the demise of Islamic fundamentalism.”
    Gasoline was between about $1.40 and $1.50 a gallon then. If we had applied a federal tax increase then of $1 or $2 — as voices as varied as Tom Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, Jim Hoagland and Robert Samuelson have urged for years — we’d still have been paying less per gallon than we are now, and the money would have stayed in this country, in our hands, rather than in those of Mahmoud Ahmajinedad, or Hugo Chavez, or our “friends” the Saudis (you know, the ones who underwrite the Wahhabist madrassas).
    And who, on the day after the terrorist attacks, would have refused? Most Americans would have been glad to be asked to do something to fight back.
    We could have used that money for a lot of things, from funding the War on Terror (rather than passing the debt to our grandchildren) to accelerating the development of hydrogen, solar, wind, clean coal, methanol-from-coal, electric cars, mass transit — on something useful. We would have started conserving a lot more a lot faster, reducing demand enough to deliver a shock to world oil prices. Demand would have resumed its rise because of such irresistible forces as Chinese growth, but we would have had a salutary effect.
    But we didn’t. We didn’t do anything to defund the terrorists or the petrodictators, or to reduce upward pressure on the national debt, or to respond to rising world energy demands, or to save the planet. We didn’t do it because we can’t do it individually and have an appreciable effect — it would take a national effort, and that takes leadership. And no one in a position of political leadership — not the president, not his fellow Republicans, and not their Democratic opposition — has stood up and said, Let’s get our act together, and here’s how....
    Getting our act together would require leaders who are no longer interested in playing the Party Game. In Messrs. McCain and Obama, we had an opportunity. No major Republican is less into party than John McCain, which is why so many Republicans wanted to deny him the nomination. And in Barack Obama, Democrats have finally settled on the far-less-partisan alternative.
    But in the energy realm, what have we gotten? Sen. Obama generally sticks to the liberal/Democratic playbook: No drilling offshore or in ANWR. Play down nuclear, play up solar and wind.
    Sen. McCain, at least, is not doctrinaire Republican on energy. For that, you have to look to someone like Jim DeMint, whose op-ed piece on our pages a week ago extolled drilling, but excoriated “cap and trade.”
    Sen. McCain will at least take some items from the left (cap and trade, CAFE standards) and some from the right (let states decide whether to drill offshore), but he’s mushy about it. And any credit he gets for ideological flexibility is overshadowed by his being the author of the biggest pander on energy this year — the proposal for a “gas tax holiday.”
    An Energy Party nominee wouldn’t propose to lower the price of gasoline at the pump, so if that’s what you want — and a lot of you do want that — you can just stop reading now. Making it temporarily easier to buy more foreign oil is in no way in the national interest, and a leader would have the guts to explain that.
    The Energy nominee would increase domestic production in the short term and lead a no-holds-barred national effort to take us beyond major dependence on anybody’s oil. He (or she) would put America at the forefront of both energy innovation and environmental stewardship, and would not let any sort of ideology stand in the way. (We must distinguish, for instance, between an environmental goal that matters, such as global climate change, and the inconvenience of a few caribou.) The Energy nominee would, given the chance:

• Drill off our coast, something we’ve seen can be done with minimal environmental risk.
• Drill in the ANWR (which, as detractors note, would not solve the problem, but it would help, and would demonstrate that we’re serious).
• Prohibitively tax the ownership of SUVs, and any other unconscionable, antisocial behavior.
• Lower speed limits, and enforce them (use the fines to pay for more traffic cops).
• Take money away from highway construction, and devote it to mass transit.
• Build nuclear plants with the urgency of the Manhattan Project.
• Develop electric cars at Apollo speed.

    We need leadership that respects no one’s sacred ideological cows, left or right — leadership that will take risks to do what works, both for the nation and ultimately for the planet.
    Is that really so much to ask?

Ahmadinejad and libertarian think-tanker: Separated at birth?

As I was quickly glancing at some mail before tossing it, my eye fell upon a mug shot of Joseph L. Bast, president of The Heartland Institute. Trying to place the face, I looked up a mug of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In light of my heightened interest in all things having to do with twins these days, I couldn't help wondering:

Separated at Birth?

Just think -- if Mahmoud had come up in a tie-wearing culture, he'd be telling us not to worry about depending on petrodictators for our energy. Hey, wait a minute...

More good energy news

Back on this post, I mentioned one tidbit of evidence that was encouraging in Energy Party terms, in that at least one guy had decided to go with mass transit.

Since then, there have been a couple of news items that are, shall we say, a tad more substantial in statistical terms.

First, there was the story about Americans driving 30 billion fewer miles in a six-month period.

Now, we see more folks turning to rail travel.

As a market-oriented guy like Charles Krauthammer would put it, we're just reacting rationally to $4-a-gallon gas.

But any way you look at it, it does make us look smarter, doesn't it? Up to a point, anyway.

Wouldn't it be great if we started doing such things on purpose, because we wanted to reduce our dependence on petrodictators? Is that too much to hope for?

Promising sign at the bus stop

Go ahead and accuse me of racial profiling (or class profiling, or whatever), but I noticed something promising on Assembly Street this morning.

It was a young white guy, in a crisp shirt and tie, conservatively groomed (at a distance, you might have mistaken him for Brian Boyer), sitting on one of the benches at the big bus stop between Gervais and Lady streets. He was sitting like an athlete on the bench waiting to go into the game -- elbows on knees, hands clasped, head up and looking around expectantly.

In other words, he appeared to be waiting for a bus. An encouraging sign, in Energy Party terms. Like people ditching SUVs, or John McCain changing his mind and advocating drilling off the coast. Another sign that maybe we're starting to make choices that don't prop up petrodictators.

That was the good sign. The bad sign was that this young white-collar guy was still sitting there, still waiting, when I came back 40 minutes later. That indicates that if he was trying the bus as an alternative today, he might not try it tomorrow.

This underlines the need to improve our transit system to the point that it is a rational and attractive choice to people who do have choices, and not just a last resort for those who have no options.

Of course, maybe the guy wasn't waiting for a bus at all. In which case, never mind.

Can we drive 55? OK, how about 70?

We all know how frustrated Energy partisan Samuel Tenenbaum gets about his perfectly sensible suggestion that we save the country and the planet, and save ourselves some bucks, by driving 55 mph. He keeps hoping his moment will arrive -- will we get sensible at $5 a gallon? Or will it be $6?

Anyway, I was reminded of all that by this letter this a.m.:

Keeping to speed limit will save on gas

Apparently the high cost of gasoline is not yet a problem for the people of South Carolina.

Every driver knows that higher speeds reduce fuel efficiency. Yet traffic on our interstate highways continues to roll about 10 mph over the speed limit.

STEPHEN D. KIRKLAND

This raises the question: Do you think we can summon the political will in this state to enforce the speed limits we have now? The reason traffic "continues to roll about 10 mph over the speed limit" is that we all know that the de facto speed limit is 10 mph over -- and maybe more like 15.

Maybe we can start the movement here. How about it? Can some of y'all who get SO worked up about illegal immigration "because they're breaking the law" get worked up by speeding? After all, this isn't just about not having the right paperwork; speed kills.

If we can tap into an emotional well like that, we can save lives, save money, flip the bird to Chavez and the House of Saud and save the planet. Sounds like a good deal.

Another Southern take on Warner-Lieberman

Mere moments before the DeMint release came in, I received another release from the Southern Environmental Law Center with a different take on Warner-Lieberman, also from a Southern perspective.

Since I've got a lot of other stuff to do, I'm leaving this for y'all to sort out:

South has much at stake as U.S. Senate begins historic debate on climate change legislation

June 2, 2008
Nat Mund, Director, SELC Legislative Director (703) 851-8249
Trip Pollard, Director, SELC’s Land & Community Program (931) 598-0808

The U.S. Senate today began much-anticipated debate on the Climate Change Security Act of 2008, also known as the Warner-Lieberman bill. The U.S. has lagged well behind other industrial nations in addressing the threat of global warming. 

While the nation and the world will benefit from passage of legislation to control carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the South in particular has much at stake – and much to contribute toward curbing carbon emissions.  Each of the six states in SELC’s region (AL, GA, NC, SC, TN, VA) rank among the top 15 highest sources of carbon pollution in the U.S.   If the six states were a nation, we’d rank 7th in the world in total carbon emissions. 

Nat Mund:  “The South’s sprawling development patterns and reliance on coal for electricity mean a huge carbon footprint. And we have a lot at stake – miles of fragile coastline and some of the most biologically diverse spots on the planet.   Senators Warner, Lieberman and Boxer deserve tremendous credit for shepherding legislation to this point.”

Trip Pollard:  “Transportation generates one-third of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S., and is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in many states in the South.  Federal climate legislation must include significant funding for states and localities to implement smart growth and alternative transportation measures that can cut emissions – and help people save money – by reducing driving.”

Background:
Power plants  The South is heavily reliant on coal for its electricity. The region is home to the nation’s three dirtiest coal-fired power plants in carbon emissions – Scherer (GA), Miller (AL), and Bowen (GA). The Cumberland plant in Tennessee ranks #8.  Today there are proposals pending for four more conventional-style coal-fired power plants that would add at least 22.6 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year (see chart below).

Transportation  The South is the fastest sprawling region in the U.S., and transportation programs in the region have focused on road-building.  This translates into rising carbon emissions from the ever-increasing number of miles we are driving. From 1990-2005, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in SELC’s region increased 48.9%, outpacing the national increase of 39.2%.  Between 1982 and 1997, SELC’s six-state region developed more land by far than any other region; 6,064,500 acres compared to the next highest, the eastern Midwest at 3,777,200 acres.  Last week, a report by the Brookings Institution found that many southern metro areas had a higher than average carbon footprint per capita.

At risk   If global warming is unchecked, miles of shoreline in Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia – and the people who live there - will be more at risk from rising sea levels and more frequent and powerful hurricanes. By the same token, the likelihood of more intense drought will dry up drinking water supplies along the coast, in the Piedmont and in the mountains of the fast growing region. Ecologically, some of the most biologically diverse habitats in the world – including the Southern Appalachian highlands and longleaf forests along the coast – could suffer dire consequences.   

        Company Megawatts       CO2 emissions tons/year Cost estimates as of 5/08      
Pee Dee, SC     Santee Cooper   1320    11 million      $1.35 billion 
Cliffside, NC   Duke Energy     800     6.25 million    $1.8 - 2.4 billion    
Washington County, GA   Electric cooperatives   850     unknown at this time    $2 billion    
Wise Co, VA     Dominion  Power 585     5.4 million     $1.8 billion   
TOTAL           3,555   at least 22.65 million  at least $6.95 billion

Sorry about that chart; it didn't transfer all that well. I'd give you a direct link to the release, but it's not up on the site yet.

Lieberman-Warner can't possibly be as good as DeMint makes it sound

Just got a release from Jim DeMint about the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. Now I've gotta tell ya that what with the last week of the legislative session and the last week before the state primaries and other stuff, I haven't sat down and studied said legislation. If I were going to editorialize about it, I suppose I would, but who's got time for that?

This leaves me with sort of a vague sense that it must be a pretty good thing, since Joe says it "would substantially cut US greenhouse-gas emissions" and other good stuff, and Joe's never lied to me as far as I know.

But now Jim DeMint is trying to double my knowledge of this bill with HIS release, and I don't have time to read to the end of that, either, but I did read the headline, which says "Lieberman-Warner Will Cost SC Jobs, Could Double Gas Prices."

OK, "cost SC jobs" sounds pretty bad, but then he says it "could double gas prices," which sounds like a move in the right direction, in Energy Party terms, and that's amazing in itself, seeing as how everybody else in Washington seems to be all about encouraging increased consumption with gas tax holidays and tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and other demagogic doo-dads.

But surely he's exaggerating with the "double" bit. Now mind you, if we had doubled the price a couple of years ago with a stiff federal tax -- jacking it from $2 to $4 a gallon -- we'd be paying the same price we are now, have chilled consumption, encouraged conservation, dealt a likely death blow to some of the worst regimes in the world by dropping the floor out from demand, and the extra money would be OURS, in our federal coffers, rather than in the hands of the sheiks and the thugs abroad.

But we didn't. And I sincerely doubt we're going to do so now, no matter how brave Mr. DeMint thinks Joe is...

Hey, does Juan pick coffee in the woods?

Speaking of the Lieberman-Warner Act -- and if you recall, we were doing that earlier, if only peripherally -- I got a release today from the NRDC supporting said Energy Partyesque legislation. But before I could dig into all the highly persuasive arguments, I got distracted by the NRDC logo. Before I had focused on it properly, my brain went, "Hey, isn't that Juan Valdez?"

But it wasn't. It was just a logo that suggests the "mountain-grown" logo to the extent that it causes the casual observer to do a double-take. And once the observer does look more closely, he sees that instead of Juan Valdez in front of some Colombian mountains, it's actually a bear in front of some trees. Which, just to impose a digression on a digression, would seem to create less-than-savory associations regarding bears and what they do in the woods, but I'm sure the NRDC knows what it's doing.

Meanwhile, I inadvertently discovered that apparently Juan Valdez is no longer associated with a certain big-name American grocery-store coffee brand, but has branched out. So good luck to Juan with his new business, especially as it does not conflict with my own (that's a digression to the third power, for those keeping score).

We CAN drive 55

My best-known Energy Party think-tank fellow called yesterday pretty excited that Tom Friedman had mentioned our 55-mph speed limit plank. The column in question appeared on our op-ed page today. Here's the passage in question:

It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break than ask the American people to drive 55 mph, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from, what he called, our “addiction to oil.”

That was just a portion of the overall message of the column, which is that our nation's strategic failures -- chief among them the failure to adopt a rational energy policy (or any energy policy, really) after 9/11 -- have left the nation in a multifaceted bind that is going to be phenomenally difficult, if not impossible, to get out of.

“Call it the triple deficit,” said Mr. Rothkopf. “A fiscal deficit that will soon have us choosing between rationed health care, sufficient education, adequate infrastructure and traditional levels of defense spending, a trade deficit that has us borrowing from our rivals to the point of real vulnerability, and a geopolitical deficit that is a legacy of Iraq, which may result in hesitancy to take strong stands where we must.”

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.

The metaphor is inadequate, because one, just one, of those shovels would be energy policy, of which 55 mph would be just one essential facet among many. In fact, that one facet could be a bellwether as to whether we have a chance, even a very slim one, to turn things around. To have any hope, we're going to have to achieve a phenomenal bipartisan consensus to do everything envisioned in the Energy Party Manifesto. And let me say it one more time: That's just to have an outside chance.

You don't want to slow down to 55? Guess what, neither do I. But if we're not willing to do that, something that is such a minor sacrifice as that, then forget the rest. Our nation is doomed to accelerate into decline.

To hear the voice of one American who is flat ready to do what it takes, listen to the audio  of Samuel Tenenbaum's phone message.

Now, as Jimmy Malone said to Eliot Ness (in the story, anyway): "What are you prepared to do?" And if your answer is that you are prepared to do that which is convenient, that which pleases you -- ideologically, or economically, or in whatever way -- I ask, "And then what are you prepared to do?"

Join the movement. Join the Energy Party, before it's too late for America.

Did Joe Wilson do a brave and smart thing? Critic says he did

A Democrat who wants to oppose U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson in the fall put out this release yesterday:

Beaufort, SC – Today, Democratic Congressional Candidate Rob Miller released the following statement concerning incumbent Joe Wilson's vote yesterday against legislation that could lower gas prices as much as 24 cents a gallon. Wilson was one of only 25 members of Congress to vote against H.R. 6022, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Fill Suspension and Consumer Protection Act. Majorities in both parties voted in favor of this legislation to provide Americans some quick relief from record high gas prices.

     "Joe Wilson owes people back home an explanation on why he sided with big oil and voted against providing families much needed relief at the gas pump. People are struggling simply to pay for the gas that gets them to and from work these days. Joe Wilson seems to be too busy cozying up to oil executives to even notice," Miller said. 
     "This is just another reason I'm running for Congress to bring change to Washington and give the voters of the Second District the representation they deserve."

                ###

I have yet to see a statement from Joe himself on the subject, but Rob Miller is a recent captain in the United States Marine Corps, and they're not trained to lie, so I'm going to take him at his word on this.

Now if Joe were running on the Grownup Party (a.k.a. UnParty, a.k.a. Energy Party) ticket, he'd be bragging about doing this. But since he's a mere Republican, he's not boasting.

But from this account, it sure sounds like he did the right thing.

Lindsey pandering for McCain

Someone pointed this out to me yesterday, but I was having so much trouble getting ANYTHING to post I gave up on the blog for the day. Now that things seem to working again...

We know that Lindsey Graham's best buddy in the Senate is John McCain. And predictably (but sadly), Lindsey is walking point for his party's presumptive presidential nominee on his worst idea ever -- the summer-long gas tax holiday:

Gas tax holiday to be introduced by Graham
By Doug Abrahms
GANNETT NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said he will propose suspending the federal tax of 18.4 cents a gallon for the summer in a measure on the Senate floor as early as next week.
    "On a very short-term basis, I think Sen. (John) McCain's got a really good idea -- relieve that tax," said Graham, R-S.C.
    The idea also has been widely touted by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. Democratic candidate Barack Obama has dismissed it as a political gimmick that will not solve the real problems of soaring demand and dwindling supply.
    Although presidential candidates have been talking about the gas tax holiday for weeks, there has been no vote yet.

Long-term, short-term, it's a horrible idea, that goes precisely in the wrong direction.

CORRECTION TO PREVIOUS: Earlier at this point in the post, I said Jim DeMint was with Graham and McCain on this. Wesley called from DeMint's office Wednesday to say that's not true. So I'm sorry about that. It just goes to show, I guess, that you can't believe everything you read. More about that later.

Remember, of course, that Hillary Clinton's on their side on this. The only presidential candidate talking like a grownup on this issue is the youngest of them all, Barack Obama.

This makes me feel SO much better

Energy Party think-tanker Samuel Tenenbaum gave me this book to read this morning, but knowing how slow I am at getting books read (currently I'm slogging my way through The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Breaking the Spell simultaneously, and have promised myself a novel when I'm done with those), I figured it would be awhile before I'd be in a positive to comment on it, which I figure is something Samuel is hoping I'll  do, which is why he gave me the book.

... To increase the pressure, Samuel emphasized I was one of the few he'd given it to, the others being Barack Obama, Joe Biden, U.S. Sen. Amy Klubocher (yeah, I had to ask, too -- it's the woman who spoke to the state Democratic convention over the weekend), Capt. Robert Miller (a Democrat, late of the U.S. Marines, who is trying to challenge Joe Wilson), Harris Pastides and John Mark Dean at USC... He plans to give one to Lindsey Graham tonight.

... you'll notice a trend toward Democrats there. Samuel says Dr. Dean did complain about the book's politics, to which Samuel said, Ignore the politics! Read the science!

But apparently it's not necessary to read the book in order to blog about it. This guy panned it without Samuel even giving him a copy. That is, I think he panned it -- the post was so long that I figured I could read the book quicker.

I mention this because I've got to hand it to the guy for admitting that he didn't read it. Did I tell my 11th-grade English teacher I hadn't read Moby Dick? No way (if I had, she might not have given me an A-plus on the essay test, which still stands as a great moment in the annals of the Golden Shovel). Did I tell the audience at the Salman Rushdie symposium I moderated recently that I hadn't read any of his books? No way. They might have thought less of me...

But this guy, who just comes out and says it, and dares 'em to come on (as Huck Finn would say -- and I did read that), is an inspiration to B.S. artists everywhere...

By the way, here's my short synopsis of what the book's about. Mr. Zubrin says thumbs-down to hydrogen, thumbs-up to methanol from coal.

Act your age: Join the Grownup Party

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
YOU’VE HEARD of the “UnParty” and the “Energy Party” — at least, you have if you’ve kept an eye on this space for any length of time.
    But I have yet another name for my never-ending battle against the foolishness of the Democratic and Republican parties: the Grownup Party.
    What is the Grownup Party? Let’s start with what it isn’t. It isn’t based on age. If it were, John McCain would win the party’s nomination this year, hands down. But John McCain recently proposed something that violated everything the Grownup Party stands for: a summerlong gasoline-tax vacation, which treats the voters of this country like children: You don’t like paying those mean ol’ nasty gas prices? Awww. Here’s a lollipop. Hillary Clinton likewise offended GP sensibilities by endorsing the McCain plan. Barack Obama, the youngest candidate out there, was the only one acting like a Grownup. (Although he did vote for a similar tax holiday as an Illinois state legislator. Presumably, he’s matured since then.)
    Why do Grownups not like the gas tax vacation? Sigh. Because they understand that if it has any effect on the market at all, it will encourage more fuel consumption during the busy summer months, which is bad enough in itself, but even worse in that increased demand leads to higher prices. And that way the money will go to the oil companies (it was reported last week that investors were disappointed because Exxon Mobil made a profit of only $10.9 billion in the first quarter), to petrodictators and to terrorists, instead of into the U.S. Treasury — that is, our treasury.
    Which brings us to something else about Grownups — they understand that in America, the government is us, rather than being some menacing thing out there, and that we’re very fortunate to live in this country at this time rather than in Russia under the czars — or under Vladimir Putin, for that matter. And we’re especially fortunate not to live in a place where there is no government, such as Somalia under the warlords.
    When the government does something we don’t like — which is pretty often, political immaturity being rampant — we don’t stamp our feet and talk about taking our ball (or  taxes, or whatever) and going home. Instead, we take responsibility for it, and try to bring it along. Yes, it’s a thankless task, like picking up after one’s children, or explaining to them why they can’t stay out late with their friends. But someone has to do it.
    The task may seem hopeless as well — but only to the sort who gives up. Grownups know they don’t have that option, so they keep putting forth ideas that make sense, day after day, just like Daddy  going to work.
    Here’s an example: On Friday, I posted an item on my blog headlined, “Free Thomas Ravenel.” Yes, it’s childish to cry out for attention with such misleading stunts, but I did it in the service of a Grownup purpose (and besides, it helped my three-year-old blog reach its millionth page view later that day). That purpose was to raise the question, Why do we want to pay to feed, clothe and house Mr. Ravenel for the next 10 months?
    That’s what we, the taxpayers, are going to do. Ravenel attorney Bart Daniel told the press last week that his client will report to federal prison May 29 to begin serving his sentence for conspiracy to possess cocaine with the intent to distribute.
    Yes, he needs to be punished for flouting our laws (especially since he was our state treasurer at the time), but think about it: Mr. Ravenel is a multi-millionaire. Wouldn’t a multi-million-dollar fine — him paying us — make more sense than us paying for his incarceration? Yes, he was fined $221,000, and had to pay $28,000 in restitution. But we’re going to turn right around and spend a lot of that to keep him locked up over the next few months.
    That’s on the federal level. Closer to home, South Carolina locks up more people per capita than almost any other state, and then refuses to appropriate enough money to run our prisons safely, much less to rehabilitate prisoners so that maybe we won’t have to lock them up again.
    That’s why we advocated Attorney General Henry McMaster’s “middle court” idea in a Wednesday editorial. It would operate in a way similar to drug courts, combining individual attention with certain punishment for anyone who breaks the rules. But as long as offenders followed those rules, we wouldn’t waste money locking them up.
    So far, the boys and girls over in the Legislature have not gone for this idea. That’s bad.
This is good: The city of Columbia is facing up to the fact that it costs money to lock people up for more offenses than Richland County does. The city has finally agreed to start paying a per diem fee for city prisoners housed in the county jail.
    As we said in a Friday editorial, the good news here is that as a result, the city will encourage police officers to lock up fewer offenders who pose no physical threat to the citizenry.
    This is progress. When it comes to nonviolent offenders, the “lock ’em up but don’t pay for guards” position is infantile — all emotion and immediate gratification, without a logical foundation. It’s encouraging to see our capital city moving away from it, however gradually. We await similar signs of progress on the state and federal levels.
    But we’re not holding our breath. That would be childish.

To read past columns about the Grownup Party and more, please proceed at a sedate, dignified pace to
thestate.com/bradsblog/.

The Energy Party Manifesto: Feb. 4, 2007

Since, I'm on my Energy Party kick again, it occurs to me to provide you with something never previously published on the blog: My original Energy Party column from the paper. Since it was based on a blog post to start with, I didn't post it here. Consequently, when I do my obligatory "Energy Party" link, it's always to the incomplete, rough draft version of the party manifesto.

So, if only to give myself something more complete to link to in the future, is the full column version, published in The State on Feb. 4, 2007. Here's a PDF of the original page, and here's the column itself:

THE STATE
JOIN MY PARTY, AND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS WILL COME TRUE. REALLY.
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
EVERYBODY talks about the weather, which is as boring and pointless as the cliche suggests. So let's do something about it.
    And while we're at it, let's win the war on terror, undermine tyrants around the globe, repair our trade imbalance, make our air more breathable, drastically reduce highway deaths and just generally make the whole world a safer, cleaner place.
    It'll be easy, once we make up our minds to do it. But first, you Democrats and Republicans must throw off the ideological chains that bind you, and we independents must get off the sidelines and into the game.
    In other words, join my new party. No, not the Unparty I've written about in the past. You might say that one lacked focus.
    This one will be the Energy Party. Or the "Responsible Party," "Pragmatic Party" or "Grownup Party." Any will do as far as I'm concerned, but for the sake of convenience, I'm going with "Energy" for now.
    Like weather, everybody talks about Energy, but nobody proposes a comprehensive, hardnosed plan to git 'er done. So let's change that, go all the way, get real, make like we actually know there's a war going on. Do the stuff that neither the GOP nor the Dems would ever do.
    I've made a start on the plan (and mind, I'm not speaking for the editorial board here). Join me, and we'll refine it as we go along:
-- * Jack up CAFE standards. No messing around with Detroit on this one. It's possible to make cars that go 50 miles to the gallon. OK, so maybe your family won't fit in a Prius. Let's play nice and compromise: Set a fleet average of 40 mph within five years.
-- * Raise the price of gasoline permanently to $4. When the price of gas is $2, slap on a $2 tax. When demand slacks off and forces the price down to $1.50, jack the tax up to $2.50. If somebody nukes some oil fields we depend upon, raising the price to $3, the tax drops to $1. Sure, you'll be paying more, but only as long as you keep consuming as much of it as you have been. Which you won't. Or if you do, we'll go to $5.
-- * You say the poor will have trouble with the tax? So will I. Good thing we're going to have public transportation for a change (including my favorite, light rail). That's one thing we'll spend that new tax money on.
-- * Another is a Manhattan project (or Apollo Project, or insert your favorite 20th century Herculean national initiative name) to develop clean, alternative energy. South Carolina can do hydrogen, Iowa can do bio, and the politicians who will freak out about all this can supply the wind power.
-- * Reduce speed limits everywhere to no more than 55 mph. (This must be credited to Samuel Tenenbaum, who bends my ear about it almost daily. He apparently does the same to every presidential wannabe who calls his house looking for him or Inez, bless him.) This will drastically reduce our transportation-related fuel consumption, and have the happy side benefit of saving thousands of lives on our highways. And yes, you can drive 55.
-- * Enforce the blasted speed limits. If states say they can't (and right now, given our shortage of troopers, South Carolina can't), give them the resources out of the gas tax money. No excuses.
-- * Build nuclear power plants as fast as we can (safely, of course). It makes me tired to hear people who are stuck in the 1970s talk about all the dangerous waste from nuke plants. Nuclear waste is compact and containable. Coal waste (just to cite one "safe" alternative) disperses into the atmosphere, contaminates all our lungs and melts the polar ice caps. Yeah, I know; it would be keen if everyone went back to the land and stopped using electricity, but give it up -- it ain't happening.
-- * Either ban SUVs for everyone who can't demonstrate a life-ordeath need to drive one, or tax them at 100 percent of the sales price and throw that into the winthe- war kitty.
-- * If we don't ban SUVs outright, aside from taxing them, launch a huge propaganda campaign along the lines of "Loose Lips Sink Ships." Say, "Hummers are Osama's Panzer Corps." (OK, hot shot, come to my blog and post your own slogan.) Make wasting fuel the next smoking or DUI -- absolutely socially unacceptable.
-- * Because it will be a few years before we can be completely free of petrol, drill the ever-lovin' slush out of the ANWR, explore for oil off Myrtle Beach, and build refinery capacity. But to keep us focused, limit all of these activities to no more than 20 years. Put the limit into the Constitution.
    You get the idea. Respect no one's sacred cows, left or right. Yeah, I know some of this is, um, provocative. But that's what we need. We have to wake up, go allout to win the war and, in the long run, save the Earth. Pretty soon, tyrants from Tehran to Moscow to Caracas will be tumbling down without our saying so much as "boo" to them, and global warming will slow within our lifetimes.
    Then, once we've done all that, we can start insisting upon some common sense on entitlements, and health care. Whatever works, whatever is practical, whatever solves our problems -- no matter whose ox gets gored, or how hard you think it is to do what needs doing. Stop whining and grow up. Leave the ideologues in the dust, while we solve the problems.
    How's that sound? Can any of y'all get behind that? Let me know, because we need to get going on this stuff.

Join the party at my -- I mean, our-- Web Headquarters:  http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Tom Friedman's back, and he's going to bat for the Energy Party!

Tom Friedman is finally back after a four-month, book-writing sabbatical. The NYT said he'd be back in April, and he just barely made it! (Now I can stop fielding those phone calls from readers wanting to know what happened to him. Here's a recording of one of those. )

And he's coming out swinging... and best of all, he's coming out swinging on behalf of the Energy Party (whether he knows it or not). His first column is headlined, "Dumb as We Wanna Be," and you'll see it on our op-ed page tomorrow. An excerpt:

    It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.
    When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit...

Go get 'em, Tom! That's a very fine leadoff hit. Coming up to bat next, on the same op-ed page, will be Robert Samuelson, and he'll bring Friedman around to score. His piece, succinctly headlined "Start Drilling," is the rhetorical equivalent of a hard line drive down the opposite-field line:

    What to do about oil? First it went from $60 to $80 a barrel, then from $80 to $100 and now to $120. Perhaps we can persuade OPEC to raise production, as some senators suggest; but this seems unlikely. The truth is that we're almost powerless to influence today's prices. We are because we didn't take sensible actions 10 or 20 years ago. If we persist, we will be even worse off in a decade or two. The first thing to do: Start drilling.
    It may surprise Americans to discover that the United States is the third-largest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. We could be producing more, but Congress has put large areas of potential supply off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. By government estimates, these areas may contain 25 billion to 30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion barrels of proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves)....

Not start drilling as a substitute for conservation or the search for new fuels (as the ideologues of the right would have it, and the ideologues of the left deplore), but in addition to. Like I said, this is straight out of the Energy Party playbook (yeah, I know this started as a baseball metaphor, not football, but bear with me).

To reduce dependence on tyrannical foreign sources, to help out Mother Nature, to keep our economy healthy, to stoke innovation, to win the War on Terror, and make us healthier, wealthier and wiser, we should adopt the entire Energy Party platform. We should, among other things I'm forgetting at the moment:

• Increase CAFE standards further -- much further.
• Raise the tax on gasoline, NOT reduce it, so that we'll suppress demand, which will reduce upward pressure on prices, and we'll be paying the higher amounts to ourselves rather than America-haters in Russia, Iran, Venezuela and yes, Saudi Arabia.
• Use the proceeds for a Manhattan Project or Apollo Project (or whatever else kind of project we choose, as long as we understand that it's the moral equivalent of war) to develop new technologies -- hydrogen, solar, wind, geothermal, what have you -- and shifting the mass of the resources to the most promising ones as they emerge.
• Reduce highway speed limits to 55 mph, to conserve fuel and save lives (OK, Samuel? I mentioned it.) And oh, yeah -- enforce the speed limits. The fines will pay for the additional cops.
• Drill in ANWR, off the coasts, and anywhere else we can do so in reasonable safety. (Yes, we can.)
• Increase the availability of mass transit (and if you can swing it, I'd appreciate some light rail; I love the stuff).
• Fine, jail or ostracize anyone who drives an SUV without a compelling reason to do so. Possible propaganda poster: ""Hummers are Osama's Panzer Corps."

And so forth and so on.

My point is, no more fooling around. It's way past time to get serious about this stuff, and stop playing little pandering games. Let's show a little hustle out there. And no dumb mistakes running the bases out there, fellas...

P.S. -- The name of the book Mr. Friedman's been writing, which will come out in August, is Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- and How It Can Renew America. So yeah, he's got an economic stake in these concepts. Well, more power to him. There's money to be made in doing the smart thing, and to the extent he can persuade us to move in that direction, he deserves to get his taste.Just to help him out, here's video of him talking about these ideas. Here's a link to his recent magazine piece on the subject.

A Grownup Party forum

As I mentioned back here, sometimes I call the UnParty the Energy Party (depending on the subject at hand), and once or twice I've referred to the Grownup Party. That kicked off a discussion that I think has a certain relevance to some of the philosophical friction that vexes us these days. Here's the discussion:

Doug, I give you credit for being a consistent anarchist...but don't you support parental "authority"?

Posted by: Randy E | Apr 30, 2008 9:17:05 AM

Not coercive authority... I should be able to influence my children through my words and actions, not by threats or intimidation.

I want a government based on ethics, productivity, and fairness.   We have a government based on lies, inefficiency, and
greed.   

Posted by: Doug Ross | Apr 30, 2008 9:48:46 AM

Actually, whenever I have disputes with libertarians, I do so as a parent. I'm in my 32nd year of being a parent. I have five kids and three grandchildren, and my worldview is that of a parent. Whenever I hear people standing up for their "right" to do something stupid -- such as not wear motorcycle helmets on the public roads -- I hear the voice of a child. By now, it's sort of hard-wired into me.

Lots of people look at laws in terms of "what this means to me" in terms of "what I get to do" or "what gets done to me." I tend to look at society as a whole and think, Is this a good idea overall? or Does this make society safer, or healthier, or wealthier? or Is this the logical way for society to function?

I don't think, Do I want to pay this tax? or Do I think I should have to buckle my seat belt? To me, those are unacceptably self-centered questions. This makes for profound disagreements, because the basic cognitive processes, the entire perspective going in, is very, very different.

Posted by: Brad Warthen | Apr 30, 2008 9:52:30 AM

Brad,

You may not understand this but my view on society is the same as yours: Is this a good idea overall? Does this make society safer, or healthier, or wealthier? Is this the logical way for society to function?

And then I examine the issue using my own personal experience as reference. Take taxes for example... I look at the issue logically based on the taxes I pay and conclude that a) the system is illogical b) the use of tax dollars is inefficient and c) the tax burden is unfairly applied.
I don't want MY taxes to be lower, I want EVERYONE's taxes to be lower... because I believe our economy would be far better off for EVERYONE if we had less government. The same logic applies to my views on Social Security, healthcare, education, etc.

Your world view is what gives us the government we have today. One where we citizens pay people to sit around making crucial decisions like: when can we sell beer and wine on Sunday? what time does a store need to open on Sunday? what tax breaks does a newspaper deserve that other companies do not? should we give people age 785 and over a 1/2% sales tax break? how much of the taxpayers' money should we give to the Okra Strut? and on and on it goes. Completely wasted effort... I want to see that abolished for EVERYONE's benefit, not my own.

Big government types are worse than selfish - they take what isn't theirs.

Posted by: Doug Ross | Apr 30, 2008 10:52:03 AM

And I see those as unrelated questions, not in terms of some sort of overriding conflict between "government" and... what -- "ungovernment?" But you're right in that government in one sense or another is involved in all those decisions. What I wonder about is what you see as the alternative.

Basically, we have this thing called a civilization. But even in the most chaotic, anarchic situations, certain arrangements arise among human beings that determine how they are going to live together (or NOT live together). Such things seem unavoidable in a group of any sort of social animals. With gorillas, you have a whole network of decisions and arrangements that tend to be built around the overriding question of, "Who gets to be the alpha male?"

Things get more complicated with humans because we are a verbalizing race, and think in symbols and abstractions that can't be communicated without language. But everywhere that there are two or more humans together, some sort of arrangement or agreement has to be arrived at in terms of how to interact and arrange things, from the ownership of property to acceptable behavior.

In the closest thing to a state of nature -- a place where government has utterly collapsed, such as in Somalia; or a place where conventional government is not recognized as legitimate, such as Sicily over the centuries -- you have something closer to the "alpha male" model found among other creatures. In Somalia, it's warlords. In Sicily (and sometimes among transplanted communities of Sicilians) you have a system of bosses and underbosses who hold power through the most elemental system of violence-backed "respect."

Now THAT is a system in which somebody is, as you say, taking what isn't theirs.

Actually, through much of human history, the warlord model has held sway, in such disparate settings as pre-communist China and Europe during the middle ages. Europeans called it feudalism. Under such a system, wealth that is coerced from weaker members of the society is used in such capital projects as building fortresses for the warlords. What you don't see in a system such as that is a system of roads. For such infrastructure as that, which might economically benefit the society more broadly, there has to be a different governing system. For well over 1,000 years, Europeans continued to use roads the Romans had built because that was the last time there was a broad government with an overarching concept of acting on behalf of something broader -- in that case, an empire in which the rule of law was only helpful if you were a Roman.

You saw some city-states rise up in Italy, and bands of city states along the Baltic and in other regions, in which councils and other decision-making bodies created infrastructure and regulations that facilitated commerce that created wealth for a somewhat larger group.

Anyway, to speed ahead... in this country we came up with representative democracy as a means for a free people to work out questions of how they would arrange themselves socially and make the decisions that WILL BE MADE one way or another among any group of humans. Once everyone gets a voice like that, all sorts of questions will come up: Do we need a new road? OK, how will we pay for it? Some people will not want to see alcohol sold at all, others will have an opposite view. Perhaps for a time, the community will strike a compromise: OK, we'll allow alcohol to be sold in our community, but not on Sunday, because there is a critical mass in the community that finds such activities on a Sunday beyond the pale, and those who don't feel that way go along to get what they want on the other six days.

Of course, laws governing alcohol get far more complicated than that, with debates over where to draw the lines in terms of operating a car on the PUBLIC roads after drinking, whether minors can drink or even hang out in drinking establishments, and so forth. And all of these are legitimate areas for regulation as long as we, acting through this system of representative democracy, decide they ARE legitimate areas for such.

Government, and politics, are in our system the proper place for deciding where all those lines are.

In our constitutional system, we have in writing certain guarantees to prevent a government answering to a majority doesn't trample certain fundamental rights (life, liberty, and such) of any individuals, including those in political minorities. This does not, of course, mean that individuals can blow off the more general will. You can't commit murder just because it's in keeping with your personal value system. Nor can you take your neighbor's car without his permission, or poison his cat, or engage in insider trading, or sell beer in a community that has legitimately (acting through the proper processes) decided to make that illegal.

This is a great system; it beats the hell out of doing things according to the whim of the local warlord. And everyone -- libertarians, authoritarians, Christians, Wiccans, what have you -- get to make their case in the public square.

Some libertarians, unfortunately, seem to regard the political and governmental decisions that THEY DISAGREE WITH -- a tax they don't want to pay, for instance -- as being illegitimate. But they aren't.

Each and every one of us accepts losing political arguments, and submitting to the resulting regulations or laws or lack thereof -- as the price of living in this (I would argue) highly enlightened system of making social decisions. We accept it rather than go live in a place where only brute force counts.

That doesn't mean we don't make our case for the next election, and so forth.

Is anything I'm saying here making sense to you?

Posted by: Brad Warthen | Apr 30, 2008 11:51:33 AM

Also, Brad, your view of government is what gets us things like rebate checks to stimulate the economy and gas tax holidays.   

McCain claims both of those are great ideas designed to help everybody out when, in reality, he supports them for purely selfish reasons - to dupe voters so he can get elected President. He hasn't got the guts to tell the truth. His own personal ambition means more to him than the truth. Guess he'd make a good libertarian, huh?

Posted by: Doug Ross | Apr 30, 2008 11:56:27 AM

You can't commit murder just because it's in keeping with your personal value system. Nor can you take your neighbor's car without his permission, or poison his cat, or engage in insider trading, or sell beer in a community that has legitimately (acting through the proper processes) decided to make that illegal.
-Brad

Murder or killing the neighbor's cat are issues not in dispute by anyone, libertarians or otherwise. Those are acts that clearly affect other people and clearly must involve intervention by the government. Doug nor anyone else has suggested the legalization of murder. Clearly that is the mother of all non-sequetors.

But selling or buying beer on Sunday is completely different. That is a decision which rightly belongs in a class of activities that can and should best be handled by individuals without interference from the government because it has no affect on others. That is true regardless of who has their say in the public square. If I want to buy beer on Sunday that is a decision that should be made on the basis of my own conscience, religious views and other factors that only I can evaluate. It's no one else's business if I buy beer on Sunday. Same with video poker, pot smoking, what I do with my own body - including who I sleep with. It's no one's damn business, period.

Let's try another example that perhaps Brad can understand. What if some religious extremist came to power and, with the help of Congress, decided that only their religion could be exercised. The majority of the people agree. The folks from the banned religions had their say in the public square but were overruled. Brad could no longer attend the Catholic Church he's been a member of for decades.

Or, let's say that all movies that depict the political process in an unflattering light must now be banned. The Manchurian Candidate can not be shown any longer as a result.

Or, perhaps hitting close to home, what if the only newspaper allowed is the one run by the government. Even though The State has run editorials oppossing this the law passes anyway. The day after the law passes the government troops occupy The State paper's operation and begin publishing their own spin on the world.

According to Brad's world view all of these events are a legitimate intrusion into the way people conduct their lives. 

Posted by: bud | Apr 30, 2008 12:51:57 PM

Right, Bud. I don't want all government abolished, just some of it. I don't want to abolish all taxes, just some of them. I don't want to repeal all laws, just those that intrude on personal rights.

The whole drug issue is a perfect example. Nobody should ever go to jail for using drugs unless they end up doing some harm to another person. We have a society filled with people popping anti-depressants and sleeping pills, abusing alcohol, etc. and yet we have law enforcement people spending time and resources making sure adults don't smoke a joint. This is a case where the moral minority in power feels a need to enforce its will upon people.

Posted by: Doug Ross | Apr 30, 2008 1:27:26 PM

Actually, bud, what you just said is completely inconsistent with what I wrote. So this is a non-argument.

And Doug, come on: When a majority wants cocaine to be legal (again), it will be. I direct you to the Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment, which were followed by the 21st Amendment...

A lot of people (primarily libertarians) point to Prohibition as evidence that such things "don't work." Nonsense. Prohibition went away for the same reason it came in-- the prevailing political will of the time, acting with sufficient force to change the constitution (which is what would be necessary for bud's farcical scenario to work, and good luck that that one, by the way).

In other words, "Prohibition doesn't work" only makes sense when you say, "Prohibition doesn't work if we don't want it."

Doug is using the reasoning of the child -- someone OUT THERE is imposing something on my in contradiction of my sovereign will. With the child, it's the parent; with Doug, it's this alleged "minority in power."

I don't look at the world that way, because I am not alienated from the American political system. Therefore I can say WE decide something, whether it was my idea or not. I don't see the decision-making apparatus as being something OUT THERE.

Posted by: Brad Warthen | Apr 30, 2008 1:43:56 PM

Hillary joins McCain in pandering on gas tax; Obama stands up to them both

This has been a busy day and I'm just getting around to some basic things now. But I couldn't let the day pass without noting how right Obama is about this:

Obama says rivals Clinton, McCain pandering on gas tax
By MIKE GLOVER and BETH FOUHY
Associated Press Writers
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. -- Democrat Barack Obama dismissed his rivals' calls for national gas tax holiday as a political ploy that won't help struggling consumers. Hillary Rodham Clinton said his stance shows he's out of touch with the economic realities faced by ordinary citizens.
    Clinton and certain Republican presidential nominee John McCain are calling for a holiday on collecting the federal gas tax "to get them through an election," Obama said at a campaign rally before more than 2,000 cheering backers a week before crucial primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. "The easiest thing in the world for a politician to do is tell you exactly what you want to hear."
    Clinton, who toured the Miller Veneers wood manufacturing company in Indianapolis, said "there are a lot of people in Indiana who would really benefit from a gas tax holiday.
    "That might not mean much to my opponent, but I think it means a lot to people who are struggling here, people who commute a long way to work, farmers and truckers," Clinton said. She has called for a windfall tax on oil companies to pay for a gas tax holiday.
    "Senator Obama won't provide relief, while Senator McCain won't pay for it," Clinton said. "I'm the only candidate who will provide immediate relief at the pump, with a plan."
    With his comments, Obama continued a running dispute over whether ending collection of the gas tax is the quickest and best way to help consumers. Leading in delegates and the popular vote, Obama in recent days has focused on McCain, but he broadened that criticism Tuesday to include Democrat Clinton.
    "Now the two Washington candidates in the race have decided to do something different," said Obama. "John McCain started it, he made the proposal, and then Hillary Clinton said 'me too.'"
    The plan would suspend collecting the 18.4 cent federal gas tax 24.4 cent diesel tax for the summer.
    He said drying up gas tax collections would batter highway construction, costing North Carolina up to 7,000 jobs, while saving consumers little.
    "We're arguing over a gimmick that would save you half a tank of gas over the course of the entire summer so that everyone in Washington can pat themselves on the back and say they did something," said Obama.
    "Well, let me tell you, this isn't an idea designed to get you through the summer, it's designed to get them through an election," said Obama. He said his call for middle-class tax cuts would be far more beneficial than suspending gas tax collections.
    Obama took a different view on the issue when he was an Illinois legislator, voting at least three times in favor of temporarily lifting the state's 5 percent sales tax on gasoline.
    The tax holiday was finally approved during a special session in June of 2000, when Illinois motorists were furious that gas prices had just topped $2 a gallon in Chicago.
    During one debate, he joked that he wanted signs on gas pumps in his district to say, "Senator Obama reduced your gasoline prices."
    But the impact of the tax holiday was never clear. A government study could not determine how much of the savings was passed on to motorists. Many lawmakers said their constituents didn't seem to have benefited. They also worried the tax break was pushing the state budget out of balance.
    When legislation was introduced to eliminate the tax permanently, Obama voted "no." The effort failed, and the sales tax was allowed to take effect again.
    Responding to Obama's criticism, McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said the Illinois senator "does not understand the effect of gas prices on the economy. Senator Obama voted for a gas tax reduction before he opposed it."
    Bounds was deliberately echoing one of Democrat John Kerry's most troublesome missteps of the 2004 presidential campaign. Kerry said of funding for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
    Obama and Clinton both opened their campaign day in North Carolina. Clinton toured a research facility and collected the prized endorsement of Gov. Mike Easley.
    "It's time for somebody to be in the White House who understands the challenges we face in this country," said Easley, in announcing his backing of Clinton. She then promptly headed for a string of events in Indiana.
    "The governor and I have something in common - we think results matter," said Clinton.
    Easley is popular with white, working-class voters that have formed the base for Clinton's success in recent primaries.
    Clinton also collected an endorsement from Democratic Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, who praised "her support in rural America, her commitment to national security and her dedication to our men and women in uniform."
    Skelton, a conservative Democrat who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, was among a half-dozen Democratic House members called to meet with Clinton after she won the Pennsylvania primary last week.
    While Obama is favored in North Carolina, the race in Indiana is very tight, and Obama was heading there Wednesday.
    Obama collected endorsements of his own during the day: In Kentucky, Rep. Ben Chandler, son of former Gov. A.B. "Happy" Chandler, gave Obama his backing ahead of that state's May 20 primary, and in Iowa, Democratic National Committee member Richard Machacek - a supporter of former Sen. John Edwards before he dropped out of the presidential race - switched his support to Obama.
    Interest in the two primaries next week has been high. Officials in Indiana said nearly 90,000 people have cast early ballots, far outpacing absentee turnout in 2004.
    At stake Tuesday are 115 delegates in North Carolina, and 72 in Indiana.
Beth Fouhy reported from Indianapolis. Associated Press writers Christopher Wills in Springfield, Ill., and Sam Hananel in Washington contributed to this report.

Obama's the only one acting like a responsible grownup here. He's also the only one speaking up for Energy Party values.

What McCain and Clinton are both doing on this is appalling. They're treating us like two-year-olds, and proposing to act in direct opposition to the nation's interests.

'I thought I told you kids to keep your toys out of the parking lot...'

So I'm rolling along through a parking lot today, and I think I see a space, but when I get to it, a portion of it -- a small portion, but enough to constitute an obstruction -- is occupied by this little yellow thing.

Being the founder of the Energy Party, you'd think I would be charmed by such an itty-bitty vehicle. But then I read that the "smart" car doesn't get in-town mileage as good as that of the much-bigger Prius (at least, that's what Wikipedia said; still looking for a better source on that). Therefore I don't think the party should endorse something that would be this appallingly unsafe on American roads (on account of the ridiculous monstrosities that predominate there), given the small tradeoff in fuel efficiency.

Thoughts from the floor?

Hold your breath

You probably already saw the news story on the subject of this release from the Southern Environmental Law Center that came in Wednesday, but I thought you might be interested in the graphic above, so I pass it on now.

The SELC's point is that the EPA's new standard isn't stringent enough. That seems like a bit like arguing about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin from a Columbia standpoint, though: We can't even meet the lower standard. The release:

South Carolina Upstate and Midlands still plagued by unhealthy air, according to EPA
EPA’s new standard fails to adequately protect public health, say environmentalists and public health professionals

Chapel Hill, NC – New standards released today by the Environmental Protection Agency show most of the South Carolina Upstate and Midlands have unhealthy levels of ozone, including the Florence region, home to a new power plant proposal that will increase the region’s ozone levels. The new standards go further to protect the public’s health from ozone pollution, but fall short of the recommendations of public health professionals and EPA’s own scientists which recommended stronger protections.

“Unfortunately EPA has chosen to bow to political interests over the public’s health by releasing a ozone standard that falls short of the recommendations of  doctors and other public health professionals.  The fact that more cities than ever are being tagged as having unhealthy air should serve as a wake up call to all South Carolinians that this is a widespread and protracted problem,”  said David Farren, senior attorney with the non profit Southern Environmental Law Center.

Under the new standard, Columbia, and Greenville are expected to remain in violation of the federal standard, otherwise known as being in “nonattainment,” while smaller cities such as Chester, Lancaster, Newberry and Seneca will likely be added to the list. These areas will face deadlines to reach the new standard or risk federal sanctions including tighter smokestacks controls and the possible loss of federal highway money. 

“What we’re seeing is that unhealthy air is not just an urban problem,” said Farren. “Even small and mid-sized cities are going to have to tackle their air problems in order to protect the health of their citizens.”

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA must set air quality standards at levels that protect public health, including sensitive populations, with an adequate margin of safety. In 1997, EPA set the national air quality standard for ozone at 0.08 parts per million (ppm) averaged over an eight hour period. The standard announced today is a slightly more stringent 0.075 ppm. However, in 2006, an EPA panel of scientists and public health experts unanimously recommended strengthening the ozone standard even lower, to within the range of 0.060 to 0.070 ppm, to adequately protect public health.

Power plants are a leading contributor to ozone pollution. In fact, the proposed Pee Dee plant will emit 3500 tons of ozone-forming nitrogen oxides each year under the existing draft air permit.

In addition to coal fired power plants, cars and trucks are among the biggest sources of ozone pollution in the South. To improve air quality, South Carolina must focus on strategies to reduce how much and how far its citizens drive such as investing in transportation alternatives and coordinating transportation and land use planning to reduce sprawl. Recently enacted reform of the state’s transportation department, if faithfully carried out, should aid in this work.

Lobbyists representing the oil, coal, electric power and manufacturing industries lobbied heavily against improved air pollution standards in the weeks leading up to the decision. However, EPA and OMB studies repeatedly show heath care costs and lost productivity far outweigh costs of clean up.

Ozone pollution, also known as smog, is known to trigger asthma attacks, reduce lung capacity, and has even been linked to heart disease and premature death. At its worst on hot, dry weather, ozone pollution causes officials to warn children and the elderly to stay indoors on many summer days. Children, whose respiratory systems are still developing, risk permanent loss of lung capacity through prolonged exposure to polluted air. For senior citizens, the natural decline in lung function that occurs with age is worsened by air pollution.

A bit of perspective on our place in the world, by the numbers

Energy Party consultant Samuel sent me this, which figures. Samuel is the guy who came up with the idea for the endowed chairs program, which bore impressive fruit yet again this week. He's still the most enthusiastic cheerleader of that program, even after our governor replaced him on the panel that oversees it:

This video -- really, sort of a powerpoint presentation, only on YouTube, is worth watching. There are some figures in it that I find suspect (I'm always that way with attempts to quantify the unknowable, which in this case applies to prediction about the future), but others that are essentially beyond reproach, and ought to make us think.

What they ought to make us think is this: So much of what we base the selection of our next president on -- party affiliation, ideological purity, our respective preferences on various cultural attitudes -- is wildly irrelevant to the challenges of the world in which this person will attempt to be the leader of the planet's foremost nation. Foremost nation for now, that is. If we don't start thinking a lot more pragmatically, it won't be for long.

Now let us energetically kick the Republicans

Having just passed on this bit of childish game-playing with our future on the part of the Democrats, I turn around and find the Republicans trying to out-stupid them, and doing a fine job of it, too.

Check out the new GOP propaganda effort, "Democrats' War on American Jobs."

Some guy name of John Boehner (no, it has an "e" and an "h" in it) is always sending me partisan claptrap like this. But I have to say that with such an over-the-top attack on such mild, inadequate energy legislation, the guy has outdone himself.

Killing our chance for CAFE standards

House Democrats, in their zeal for gesture over substance, are about to kill any chance of the CAFE increase passing, by chaining it to a tax increase.

Apparently, it would just kill them to see the president actually sign something good into law:

   WASHINGTON (AP) - Defying a threat of a presidential veto, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intends to push ahead with a $21 billion tax package, including repeal of tax breaks for major oil companies, as part of an energy bill, aides to the speaker said Tuesday.
   Democratic leaders circulated a summary of the legislation that includes the new taxes as well as a requirement for a 40 percent increase in automobile fuel efficiency, a huge increase in the use of ethanol as a motor fuel, and a mandate for utilities to use renewable fuels.
   Republicans earlier this year blocked Senate attempts to pass new energy taxes, contending they would hinder domestic oil and gas production. Democratic supporters of the taxes said that with oil hovering near $90 a barrel and the industry making large profits, the tax breaks aren't needed.
   The White House has said repeatedly that if the energy legislation singles out the oil companies for new taxes, advisers would recommend that President Bush veto the bill.

Folks, please, let us have the higher fuel standards -- please. The country needs this. We can fight about the taxes later.

I don't think I will ever, ever understand partisans -- unless we're talking UnParty. Or Energy Party. As founder, I promise you, the Energy Party would never thus endanger our chance to make U.S. cars more efficient.

What's YOUR martial status?

You know those pop-up ads you get sometimes asking for your opinion? I generally ignore them, using the excuse that I gave at the office.

But yesterday I gave in to one that hit me when I went to the WSJ site to find a link for this post. I thought it would be about some heavy political matter that I might enlarge upon in this forum. And I was right: It wanted to know what kind of SUV I might want to buy (which puts me in mind of one of my favorite Bugs Bunny quotes -- "he don't know me very well, do he?").

I tried to mess with it, to see what would happen. For instance, when it asked, "When thinking of luxury sport utility vehicles, what brand or manufacturer comes to mind FIRST?," I answered, "Unconscionable Waste." But there was no reaction.

My favorite part was when it asked, "What is your martial status?" I wanted to answer, "Total readiness, sir! Just let the bloody Hun try to take us on now!" Or maybe, since I was suffering a mild case of indigestion, "Combat ineffective." But that one was multiple-choice, and those weren't included among the options.

Why don’t candidates ask us for more than our votes?

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win....”
       — John F. Kennedy, 1962

WHAT WOULD we do if one among the horde of candidates seeking to become president of the United States in 2009 challenged us as a nation to do something hard?
    Most Americans alive today can’t remember a president or would-be president doing anything remotely like that. The ones we’re used to are all about what they’re going to do for us, not what we should do for our country. Republicans want to cut our taxes; Democrats want to give us more programs and, to hear them all talk, at no cost to us.
    But I believe that if the cause were worthwhile and the proposal made sense, we’d rise to it. Maybe not all of us, but there’s a critical mass out here who would follow someone courageous enough to ask us to do our part.
    I, for one, am sick of being treated, by people who seek my vote, as some sort of “gimme-gimme” baby, lacking in any sense of responsibility for the world around me. Those of us who are grownups are used to accepting, in our personal lives, challenges that are by no means easy to meet — going to work day after day, paying our bills, raising children. Why would we not understand a president who said, “Here’s a challenge that concerns us all, and here’s what each of us needs to do to rise to it”?
    Young people among us want to pitch in and accomplish difficult things a lot more than we give them credit for. Part of Barack Obama’s appeal among the young is his call to service, his challenge to build a better nation. But unless I’ve missed it, he has not asked us, as a nation, to do anything hard.
    Don’t misunderstand me, as did a colleague who wrote:

    The feeling I get... is that you’re so frustrated that you just want the government to demand SOME SORT OF SACRIFICE, on something, anything. Whether it’s needed or not. Doesn’t really matter what.

    Well, yes and no. Sure, there’s a part of me that just wants to be asked for a change to do something, if only for the novelty: Buy bonds, save scrap metal, whatever.
    But there’s more to it than that. The truth is, our country faces a lot of challenges that demand something or other from all of us, but political “leaders” have a pathological fear of pointing it out to us.
    Back when JFK challenged us to go to the moon because it was hard, we did it — even though there was no practical reason why we needed to do so. Sure, it gave us the creeps to think of “going to sleep by the light of a communist moon,” but it was a symbolic competition, with only marginal applications to the true, deadly competition of the arms race. We couldn’t stand not to be No. 1.
    But today we have very real, very practical challenges that have tangible consequences if we fail to meet them.
    Take just one of them: our dependence on foreign oil.
    Sen. Joe Biden had a great speech a while back about how President Bush missed the golden opportunity to ask us, on Sept. 12, 2001, to do whatever it took to free us from this devil’s bargain whereby we are funding people who want to destroy us and all that we cherish. And yet, his own energy proposals are a tepid combination of expanding alternative fuels (good news to the farmer) and improving fuel efficiency (let’s put the onus on Detroit).
    A broad spectrum of thinkers who are not running for office — from Tom Friedman to Robert Samuelson to Charles Krauthammer — say we must jack up the price of gasoline with a tax increase, to cut demand and fund the search for alternatives. It makes sense. But the next candidate with the guts to ask us to pay more at the pump will be the first.
    My friend Samuel Tenenbaum is on a quixotic quest to build support for restoration of the 55-mph speed limit. It would be hard (for me, anyway), but the benefits are undeniable. It would conserve fuel dramatically, starving petrodictators from Hugo Chavez to Vladimir Putin to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It would save thousands of lives now lost to speed on our highways.
    Samuel pitches his idea to every candidate he can corner. They smile and move away from him as quickly as possible.
    But you know, when I wrote a column a while back proposing the creation of an Energy Party — that would among other things demand that we jack up the gas tax by $2 a gallon (to fund an Apollo-style project on alternatives), institute Samuel’s 55-mph limit, ban SUVs for anyone without a proven “life-or-death need to drive one” and build nuclear power plants as fast as we can — I got a surprising number of positive responses. I think that was less because my respondents thought those were all good ideas. I think they just liked the idea of being asked to do something for a change.
    Energy independence is just the start. Add to it the urgent needs to stop global warming, win the war on terror, make health care affordable while at the same time avoiding the coming entitlements train wreck, and you’ve got a list of things that require a lot more audience involvement — and yes, sacrifice — than our current candidates have been willing to ask us for.
    And while you may not feel the same, I’m dying to be asked. Not because it would be easy, and not even because it would be hard, but because these hard things actually need doing.

Midlands environmentalists gird for battle

This just in from Bob Wislinski:

Conservation organizations from across the state will gather in Columbia Thursday, October 25, 11 AM in the SC Wildlife Federation conference room at Middleburg Office Plaza (Kittrell Bldg. – directions attached) to announce opposition to Santee Cooper's proposed coal plant in Kingsburg.

Several weeks ago, the SC Electric Cooperatives released new studies showing conservation and renewable energy savings possible within their systems over the next 10 years. The Electric Coops are state-owned utility Santee Cooper's largest customers. Last week and in the face of mounting criticism of their Pee Dee coal plant proposal, Santee-Cooper announced new internal long-term energy conservation programs too.

Yet Santee-Cooper still insists that its controversial 1320 MW Pee Dee pulverized coal plant is needed.

The studies by the cooperatives contradict Santee-Cooper's assertions about the essential need for the coal plant. This comparative and statistically valid case against the coal plant has never been publicly presented in this fashion.

Groups represented at the Conference will include: Coastal Conservation League, Environmental Defense, Conservation Voters of South Carolina, SC Sierra Club, SC Wildlife Federation, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and Southern Environmental Law Center.

... which reminds me. The co-ops came in to see us Monday about their studies, and I haven't posted anything yet, because it was a lot of stuff to digest. I'll get to it soon.

 

I don't deserve the credit

After noting that one or two of my correspondents were -- and I'm sure they were doing it for convenience's sake -- referring to the gasoline tax hike as "Brad's taxing scheme," or using similar terms, I thought I'd better set the record straight.

I deserve neither the credit nor the blame. In fact, before I embraced the idea, I went through all the objections that y'all raise -- disproportionate burden on the working class, cooling effect on the economy, etc. But I believe this is the best, clearest way to:

• Spread the burden of fighting terror among ALL of us; it's obscene that we're not asked to do a thing beyond being inconvenienced at airports. (And while I worry about the poor as well, it's interesting that David Brooks seems to think that raising the gas tax is more progressive than the SCHIP program. He must be correlating SUV ownership to wealth, or something.)
• Cut off funding to some of the worst enemies we have in this world, who are made a little richer every time we top off the tank.
• Push us toward alternative fuels that are not only strategically smarter, in terms of making us less dependent, but much, much friendlier to this endangered orb. It would do this partly by making gasoline less marketable, but it would also...
• Provide a lucrative new revenue stream to -- take your pick -- pay for the war, fund our neglected infrastructure, build public transportation (I'll take light rail, please) and develop better fuels. My pick would be all of the above, if the stream were big enough.

I did not arrive there by myself. I was influenced by an array of other writers, who have hit this theme again and again over the last couple of years.

To answer the question asked by Jimmy Rabbite of prospective band members in "The Commitments," here are my influences, and links to their works:

Robert J. Samuelson
As the economist in the bunch, he presents the idea most credibly, thoroughly and convincingly. If a guy like Samuelson were against the idea, I'd be worried. His being for it gives me confidence in something that I arrive at in a more intuitive manner.

• An Oil Habit America Cannot Break -- October 18, 2006 --...Our main energy problem is our huge dependence on imported oil. For years, some remedies have been obvious: Tax oil heavily to spur Americans to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles and to drive a bit less, raise sharply the government's fuel economy standards so those vehicles are available, and allow more oil and gas drilling. In recent years, we've done none of these things. It's doubtful we will anytime soon...
• Greenhouse Guessing -- November 10, 2006 -- ...In rich democracies, policies that might curb greenhouse gases require politicians and the public to act in exceptionally "enlightened" (read: "unrealistic") ways. They have to accept "pain" now for benefits that won't materialize for decades, probably after they're dead. For example, we could adopt a steep gasoline tax and much tougher fuel economy standards for vehicles. In time, that might limit emissions (personally, I favor this on national security grounds). Absent some crisis, politicians usually won't impose -- and the public won't accept -- burdens without corresponding benefits...
  
• Seven Tough Choices We Will Not Make -- January 17, 2007 -- ...Enact an energy tax equivalent to $2 a gallon on gasoline -- introduced over six years, or about 33 cents annually. The purpose: to increase tax revenue and induce Americans to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles....
  
• Blindness on Biofuels -- January 24, 2007 -- ...The great danger of the biofuels craze is that it will divert us from stronger steps to limit dependence on foreign oil: higher fuel taxes to prod Americans to buy more gasoline-efficient vehicles and tougher federal fuel economy standards to force auto companies to produce them. True, Bush supports tougher -- but unspecified -- fuel economy standards. But the implied increase above today's 27.5 miles per gallon for cars is modest, because the administration expects gasoline savings from biofuels to be triple those from higher fuel economy standards....
  
• A Full Tank of Hypocrisy -- May 30, 2007 -- ...Today's higher gasoline prices mostly reflect supply and demand. "Holiday travelers ignoring fuel costs," headlined USA Today before the Memorial Day weekend. Gasoline demand is up almost 2 percent from 2006 levels. Meanwhile, gasoline supplies have tightened. More refineries than usual shut this spring for repairs -- some outages planned, some not (from accidents or dangerous conditions). In April and May, refineries normally operate well above 90 percent of capacity; in 2007, the operating rate was about 89 percent. Imports also declined for many reasons: higher demand in Europe; refinery problems in Venezuela; more gasoline demand from Nigeria. It's true that oil companies will reap eye-popping profits from high prices. Still, the logic that steep prices, imposed by the market or by taxes, will encourage energy conservation is irrefutable. At the least, high prices would curb the growth of greenhouse gases and oil imports....
  
• Prius Politics -- July 25, 2007 -- ...But we've got to start somewhere

  Posted by Brad Warthen at 04:00 AM in Blogosphere, Energy, Energy Party, Environment, Leadership, Marketplace of ideas, Media, Priorities, Strategic, Taxes, The Nation, The World
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