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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes lifting the moratorium on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the Outer Continental Shelf. She won't even allow it to come to a vote. With $4 gas having massively shifted public opinion in favor of domestic production, she wants to protect her Democratic members from having to cast an anti-drilling election-year vote. Moreover, given the public mood, she might even lose. This cannot be permitted. Why? Because, as she explained to Politico: "I'm trying to save the planet; I'm trying to save the planet."

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

The answer — which is that they don't understand economics — is revealed in a blog post by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Lisa Stiffler. Her report explains a review by the Beacon Hill Institute (co-sponsored by the Washington Policy Center) of the state's Climate Advisory Team recommendations to raise the costs of energy so high that people will want to move their tailpipe emissions to other countries.

That was a joke – the tailpipe emissions part.

Anyway, the BHI study is similar to ones they've done for other states where the economic analyses of costs associated with climate commissions' recommendations are severely underestimated. In Washington, BHI found among other things that the Climate Advisory Team "misinterprets costs as benefits." And then there is this revelation from reporter Stiffler:

For example, jobs are credited as a benefit, but the reviewers said this is actually a cost. This sort of confuses me as I thought job creation was generally a positive step.

Of course it is "a positive step" in the backwards world of journalism, where jobs digging holes for no apparent reason are considered productive.

W e need a new John McCain, one who throws overboard some worn-out ideas he has been toting around, and — with fire in his eyes, his belly and his rhetoric — would give an energy speech something along these lines:

Florida utility regulators on Tuesday powered down an $11.4 million program designed to promote green energy, but whose budget overwhelmingly funded marketing and administrative costs.

President Bush will meet with his Cabinet on Wednesday and is expected to discuss congressional efforts to combat high gas prices.

Senate lawmakers remained deadlocked on Tuesday over legislation to rein in excessive energy speculation, as they haggled over adding amendments to the bill.

Sometimes public opinion doesn't flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn't change anybody's mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. Evidently, the experience of paying more than $50 for a tankful gets people thinking we should stop worrying so much about global warming and the environmental dangers of oil wells on the outer continental shelf and in Alaska. Drill now! Nuke the caribou!

Bob Schaffer's opponents have spent the past two months tarring him as "Big Oil Bob," an advocate of oil drilling and an energy-industry insider. Maybe he should thank them.

Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other liberal leaders on Capitol Hill are gripped by cold-sweat terror. If they permit a vote on offshore drilling, they know they will lose when Blue Dogs and oil-patch Democrats defect to the GOP position of increasing domestic energy production. So the last failsafe is to shut down Congress.