The Offshore Snake Oil Bonanza

Republicans are tapping into a gusher of voter gullibility. According to the Rasmussen Reports, almost two-thirds of Americans approve of offshore drilling and believe that finding new sources of oil is more important than reducing the amount of energy they now use.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is waving the white flag by telling Larry King she might vote for drilling as part of a larger energy package, even as she proclaims, "I will not subscribe to a hoax on the American people that if you drill offshore, you're going to bring down the price at the pump. Even the president says that's not true."

The case for an easy fix is so compelling that the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund is taking out full-page newspaper ads to decry offshore drilling as "George W. Bush's Gasoline Price Elixir" that is "100% Snake Oil" and urge letters to Congress saying, "I am not buying the lie...that sacrificing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and America's coastal waters to oil drilling would make a real difference in gas prices--either today or twenty years from today!"

The Washington Post editorial page, ever faithful to the Bush Administration, starts out to debunk the ad but ends up agreeing that "the United States cannot drill its way to energy independence."

Offshore oil won't bring down prices at the pump (the current drop is showing that only lower demand can do that) but, as long as there are November votes buried in the issue, McCain and Congressional Republicans will keep hammering away.

Running Out and Cutting Down

As gasoline prices head toward $4 a gallon, there are signs Americans are starting to use less.

“Sustained higher gasoline prices are beginning to show up in lower gasoline consumption,” an analyst for the Energy Information Administration observes as usage declines for the first time in two decades, albeit by only a fraction of one percent. The drop was more dramatic last Christmas when total miles traveled in the US dropped 3.9 percent compared with a year earlier.

Not a minute too soon, according to Paul Krugman, who foresees hard times when "an ever-growing world economy pushes up against the limits of a finite planet" and rich countries "face steady pressure on their economies from rising resource prices, making it harder to raise their standard of living" and poorer countries "find themselves living dangerously close to the edge--or over it."

In this election year, politicians will talk darkly about oil industry collusion to raise prices, which may well be true, but not much about conservation. Voters don't want to hear about driving less, carpooling, using mass transit and buying fuel-efficient vehicles.

But $4 a gallon seems to be getting their attention, and $5 would have them spellbound. Starting to conserve now would help stave that off.

Earth Day would be a good time to start.

Cheney's Busted Flush on Iran

If the Vice President were a publicly traded stock, the Exchange would have start thinking about de-listing him. Even the truest-believing Neo-Cons will soon have to stop buying.

The latest bad news to hit the ticker is that the Iran card is getting harder to play. With rioting, stone-throwing and mass protests over the rise in gasoline prices, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is looking less and less like Saddam Hussein every day.

Cheney won’t be in a position to make any more rousing speeches on the decks of aircraft carriers any time soon, even if he can get out from under all rioting against him in Washington about the price of secrecy.