Driving is an American pastime on Memorial Day weekend. Indeed, today’s holiday is THE road trip occasion in American culture. This acute association explains why American politicians choose the lead up to Memorial Day to trot out plans to address high gasoline prices.

This year, it was dueling votes in the Senate. Roughly speaking, the Republicans tried to increase the supply of oil by ending the Obama administration’s de facto moratorium on domestic drilling, wrought by bureaucratic foot-dragging. The legislation already had been passed by the Republican-controlled House. On the other hand, the Democrats wanted to raise taxes on “Big Oil” companies, by eliminating tax breaks enjoyed by many—and in some cases, all—businesses. Neither party wooed enough votes to survive a filibuster, so they both failed. Of the two, the Republicans’ ideas were better this time, but there have been instances in the past when both parties were equally bad in the run up to Memorial Day weekend.

In May 2001, for example, President George W. Bush unveiled his administration’s much-hyped “Task Force Report on Energy.” To be sure, there were some great ideas in the unwieldy report, but there were also many awful ideas, foremost among them being the President’s proposal to waste taxpayer dollars on the FreedomCar initiative, a dead-end hydrogen fuel technology. The Task Force Report on Energy also called for a scientific report on the need for more stringent Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards. This was the first step to the President ultimately signing into law increased fuel efficiency standards in late 2007. As has been covered extensively by my colleague Sam Kazman, CAFE standards are unwarranted violations of consumer choice that have the unfortunate side-effect of killing motorists.

The last Republican President’s transportation policies were losers, but Congressional Democrats are the league leaders in stupid energy policies issued near Memorial Day. Consider their run since 2006:

2006: Senate Democrats scuttled legislation to open ANWR with a promised filibuster.

2007: House Democrats passed the cleverly titled NOPEC (No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act) bill, legislation that would somehow alter the resource acquisition decisions made by sovereign countries, among them allies. That is, the NOPEC bill was pure, unadulterated grandstanding.

2008: Senate Democrats tried to drum up drama over nefarious oil “speculators.” Like the 2007 NOPEC Act, targeting “speculators” sounds furious, but signifies nothing.

2009: House Democrats proposed a novel solution for high gas prices: higher gas prices. With the support of House leadership, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) pushed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme designed to raise the price of hydrocarbon energy like gasoline.

2010: BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster dominated the energy policy debate for the entire summer. Funny how we don’t talk about that anymore.

The hit song “Apologize” could become the theme song of the 2012 Republican Presidential campaign.

Mitt Romney won’t shed his “Romney-care” baggage through a simple apology. Instead he is embracing his controversial plan, claiming that he is no “flip-flopper.” While he is pulling strong poll numbers, pundits believe this one issue will make it tough for him to garner the support of conservatives and may cost him the nomination.

Likewise, Gingrich was thought to be a strong candidate with layers of people and policy carefully in place. Instead of catapulting to the top, as he likely expected with his May 11 announcement, he has been in the forefront of the news with his apology to Paul Ryan for his Sunday morning gaffe regarding the Ryan Plan. He has made several fumbled attempts to recover from this violation of Ronald Reagan’s famed “eleventh commandment,” but most cannot forgive him for sitting on the sofa with Nancy Pelosi and agreeing with her that “our country must take action to address climate change.” No worry. He has not asked for forgiveness and, in fact, refuses to apologize. As recently as a year ago, Gingrich claimed that he would still do a commercial, only this time with the spin that both conservatives and liberals should be prepared to stand on the same stage.

Adding to the “apologize” theme, Tim Pawlenty, who entered the race on May 24, differs from Gingrich. He has apologized for his climate-change support. As governor of Minnesota, he supported cap-and-trade legislation and agreed to participate in the multi-state Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord—both aimed at reducing the hydrocarbon use then believed to cause global warming. Like Gingrich, back in 2008, Pawlenty was also featured in advertising from an environmental group supporting government involvement in stopping climate change. He urged Congress to “get moving” on the issue. Unlike Romney and Gingrich, he has apologized for decisions that seemed right at the time, but have become politically toxic among Republicans.  Now, he says, it was wrong. “It was a mistake, and I’m sorry.”

Setting himself apart even further, his formal announcement speech on Tuesday earned him the high praise of “downright amazing” from the Wall Street Journal. He pledged to phase out subsidies on ethanol—which was popularized to combat climate change.  WSJ political columnist John Fund said: “One of the immutable laws of modern American politics is that no candidate who wants to win the Iowa Presidential Caucuses can afford to oppose subsidies for ethanol. … By opposing ethanol despite the political risks, Mr. Pawlenty will also gain credibility to tackle other energy subsidies that drain the federal fisc to little good effect.”

It was a different political era in the mid-2000s. As TIME defines it, “Carbon regulation was not so verboten in the GOP just a few years ago.” Policies were drafted based on the then-accepted idea of man-made climate change. Apology accepted.

But T-Paw needs to do more than apologize for his climate-change stance. He needs to renounce man-made global warming and government-imposed solutions. In doing so, he needs to apologize for the wake of his actions. In Minnesota, they are now trying to meet energy standards of 25% renewable energy by 2025 with un-economic wind turbines designed to provide clean, green, and free energy—which is really expensive (not to mention it destroys the serene and beautiful farming communities, property values, and lives).

Without a total renunciation, voters are left with the assumption that Pawlenty would force the same policies, Senator Bingaman has been promoting, on all of America. Such behavior is expected of green-beholden Democrats like President Obama, but to fare well in the GOP primaries, Pawlenty needs to assure voters of a true change-of-heart. In New Mexico, the major utility company is fighting the numbers to try to provide reliable and affordable electricity that meets the mandates passed under former Governor Richardson. No matter how they run the scenarios, the mandate-meeting modeling shows increased costs for ratepayers.

Like Richardson, Pawlenty has moved on. Today, neither has direct policy impact in their individual states; each has saddled ratepayers with higher energy costs. Richardson has been replaced by a governor, who is doing her best to reverse his policies. Pawlenty’s successor will likely continue to punish Minnesotans with the Next Generation Act of 2007 foisted on the people.

Minnesota and New Mexico are just two states with renewable energy standards. Many have realized the error of their ways and are working on reversing the hidden-tax mandates that raise energy costs and hurt all ratepayers, including the broken-budget cities and counties.

Mr. Pawlenty, Americans are forgiving people—but you have to ask. We know you can say: “I’m sorry.” Can you renounce the man-made climate-change scheme, apologize for the policies you put in place that are hurting the people of Minnesota, and assure your potential voters that as President, you will not pick and choose—through mandates and subsidies—which energy sources we the people can use? It’s not “too late to apologize.”

Known as the voice for energy, Marita Noon is the Executive Director at Energy Makes America Great Inc. the advocacy arm of the Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy—working to educate the public and influence policy makers regarding energy, its role in freedom and the American way of life. She is a popular speaker, a frequent guest on television and radio, her commentaries have been published in newspapers, blogs and websites nationwide. For more information, visit www.EnergyMakesAmericaGreat.org.

The Wall Street Journal has a long piece today about the prospect of using the state to move part of the U.S. transportation fleet from oil to natural gas. It gives prominent voice to the massive public affairs campaign of T. Boone Pickens to add billions to his natural gas fortune as a swansong to a prosperous career.

This campaign takes the form of a bill embraced by ostensible fiscal hawks, causing an uproar from those conservatives who took umbrage at Members abandoning their pledges of fiscal sobriety at the drop of a billionaire’s phone call. This enabled the media to describe the Republicans’ ‘circular firing squad.’ Well played, gentlemen.

The vehicle was not Pickens’ first choice. His first choice was a windmill mandate, transparently pushed by a handful of gas interests, including Chesapeake Energy’s Aubrey McClendon, to put a green hat on their efforts to use the state to displace coal’s market. In this effort, they found natural allies in environmentalist special interests.

I happened to be in the room in 1997 with the American Gas Association, BP, and Enron as they worked with green pressure groups, as radical as the Union of Concerned Scientists as well as more mainstream, anti-coal activists like NRDC, to get a global warming treaty and a domestic cap-and-trade scheme. I couldn’t believe my ears and said so, which in a matter of weeks led to us parting ways.

When Pickens was pitching his Plan A in an off-the-record meting a few years ago, I congratulated him on discovering my old boss Ken Lay’s business plan: he had some gas interests, bought a bunch of windmills on the cheap because they aren’t economic investments, then set about to use his lobbying muscle to make them not economically viable, but rather, as President Obama is given to saying, “the profitable kind of energy.”

The windmill mandate flopped. So Pickens unloaded his windmills and reached up another sleeve. Now, the argument goes: (1) we have lots of natural gas, thanks to the hydraulic fracturing revolution in production; (2) oil is expensive; (3) therefore, we should move transportation onto natural gas, although this cannot happen without robbing taxpayer Peter to pay gassy Paul, according to anyone cited in the WSJ article.

Of course, we also have vast quantities of oil, likely all of it recoverable at a per-barrel price around half of where it stands today. So that’s not really much of an argument for such wrenching, expensive, uneconomic intervention, now is it?

But this is the sort of advocacy that bad ideas are forced to employ. As my CEI colleague Myron Ebell wrote:

Why are billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies needed?  According to T. Boone Pickens’s web site, it’s because natural gas vehicles are cheaper to operate than gasoline or diesel vehicles:  “Even with higher initial costs (which will disappear as manufacturing ramps up) the life-cycle costs of NGVs [natural gas vehicles] are significantly lower.  Fuel costs are at least 15 percent less using natural gas rather than gasoline or diesel.”

So people need to be paid in order to make them want to buy vehicles that will save them money.  Yes, that makes sense: I always prefer the more expensive product unless there is a government rebate for the cheaper one.

Given all of this, we have three takeaways from today’s Journal piece.

First, here is the chart of countries this idea seeks to have us be more like.

Message: be more like Third-World countries. But for Italy, which has long directed nearby North African gas into its economy, no other OECD country is big into this old idea. I know that history of saying “look at Spain” didn’t work out to well about the windmills, but countries without oil, like, say, über-green Germany, aren’t on the list. Why?

Second, the article acknowledges these countries have been doing this for a long time. Yet the Wall Street Journal’s pull-quote gives us the $5-$9 Billion Quote of the Day: “T. Boone Pickens on subsidies for natural-gas truckers: The government should provide five years of subsidies, ‘and then get the hell out of it.  It flies by then, or it’s a bad idea.’”

Yeah. Once you build a subsidy, and the constituencies dependent upon it, even if it doesn’t work Washington is pretty good about letting it expire. It hasn’t worked anywhere with decades of support. A clever man, Mr. Pickens.

Finally, the story admits that this very scheme was one of the ‘stimulus’ schemes. Mr. Pickens is calling for the ‘stimulus’ to continue, for his investments in the uneconomic, for 5 more years.

Stimulus. Subsidy. Can’t say it too many times. That’s what this is. Republicans, wise up.

Republicans in the New Hampshire Senate continue to dither like a eunuch in a brothel lobby, more than two months after the State House of Representatives enacted HB 519, legislation that would withdraw New Hampshire from a regional energy-rationing scheme known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, by a 246 to 104 vote. In late February, after the Republican-controlled House acted, it was widely thought that the Senate would quickly follow suit, as Republicans hold a 2 to 1 majority in the upper chamber. However, the environmentalist lobby mobilized and frightened many Members of the Legislature. Last week, the Senate Natural Resources Committee voted against HB 519 companion legislation. Nonetheless, the full Senate is expected to enact the measure this week, although it is unclear that there will be enough votes to override a promised veto from Governor John Lynch (D), even though Republicans have a veto-proof majority.