bipartisan oil fix
I won't claim that the Wall Street Journal, in general, is the most unbiased or balanced source of information, but today's opinion piece entitled A Bipartisan Fix for the Oil Crisis by Joseph Petrowski, president of Gulf Oil, is pretty much down the center.
His basic premise is that energy is too important to be used for partisan hackery by either side.
Dems: We need more oil. We can drill responsibly. Yes, we can. (Ok, that last bit was me.) Drilling now will impact prices soon because current prices are based on the predictions of future levels of oil, not just the size of supply today.
Pubs: The market is stagnant. We need to encourage better efficiency through subsidies on biofuels, R&D spending, etc. And by the way, we can't (and probably shouldn't) ever be completely energy independent, so stop that pie-in-the sky talk.
He wraps up with the following closer:Using market mechanisms and the private sector (admit it, Democrats) alongside an engaged, effective and focused government (admit it, Republicans), true leaders can solve this crisis decisively.
There are some issues I choose to be a libertarian-conservative idealist about. Petrowski is right, though. This can't be one of them. I'm willing to concede that the government needs to shape the market to *some* degree (though I think incentives are much better than mandates...carrots, not sticks) and spend some money on R&D (though I still think the big energy breakthroughs of our time will come from private, not gov't research). The left needs to be willing to concede, however, that we CAN drill in an environmentally responsible way and that no matter how much we conserve, with the growth of developing markets like India and China, we NEED to increase the supply of oil. Intentionally keeping the supply low to somehow "motivate" the next scientific breakthrough is a terrible, terrible gamble that we will lose.
Any thoughts?
His basic premise is that energy is too important to be used for partisan hackery by either side.
Dems: We need more oil. We can drill responsibly. Yes, we can. (Ok, that last bit was me.) Drilling now will impact prices soon because current prices are based on the predictions of future levels of oil, not just the size of supply today.
Pubs: The market is stagnant. We need to encourage better efficiency through subsidies on biofuels, R&D spending, etc. And by the way, we can't (and probably shouldn't) ever be completely energy independent, so stop that pie-in-the sky talk.
He wraps up with the following closer:Using market mechanisms and the private sector (admit it, Democrats) alongside an engaged, effective and focused government (admit it, Republicans), true leaders can solve this crisis decisively.
There are some issues I choose to be a libertarian-conservative idealist about. Petrowski is right, though. This can't be one of them. I'm willing to concede that the government needs to shape the market to *some* degree (though I think incentives are much better than mandates...carrots, not sticks) and spend some money on R&D (though I still think the big energy breakthroughs of our time will come from private, not gov't research). The left needs to be willing to concede, however, that we CAN drill in an environmentally responsible way and that no matter how much we conserve, with the growth of developing markets like India and China, we NEED to increase the supply of oil. Intentionally keeping the supply low to somehow "motivate" the next scientific breakthrough is a terrible, terrible gamble that we will lose.
Any thoughts?