President Bush will meet with his Cabinet on Wednesday and is expected to discuss congressional efforts to combat high gas prices.
William Yeatman
Senate lawmakers remained deadlocked on Tuesday over legislation to rein in excessive energy speculation, as they haggled over adding amendments to the bill.
In the 70s and 80s it became trendy to talk about the global gap between “North” and “South,” in the sense that the rich countries that are mostly in the North of the planet were exploiting the poor countries to the south. That was actually an exercise in blame deflection, with the poor countries blaming the North for problems that arose from their own poor choices, such as a predilection for socialism and corruption. Today, however, there is another North vs. South conflict developing. This time, the cause is global warming, and the complaints of the South deserve much more consideration.
Earlier this month the House of Representatives voted on an energy bill called the Drill Responsibly in Leased Lands (Drill) Act. The good news, for those of us who actually want to do something to lower gas prices, is that it failed.
Former Vice President Al Gore wrote a letter to the Massachusetts House of Representatives urging them to pass the Global Warming Solutions Act, which calls for greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 20% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. The bill has already passed the state Senate. Like the 2005 California law of the same title, the bill does not contain any actual solutions but instead directs the Secretary of Energy and Environment to “adopt a plan for achieving a 2020 statewide greenhouse gas emissions limit.”
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.
WHY NOT have a vote on offshore drilling? There's a serious debate to be had over whether Congress should lift the ban on drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf that has been in place since 1981. Unfortunately, you won't be hearing it in the House of Representatives — certainly, you won't find lawmakers voting on it — anytime soon.
Comments and reports about global warming are getting silly and even ridiculous. Al Gore says we have ten years left. We’re told cooling is due to warming. More rain and flooding and less rain and drought are both due to warming. More hurricanes are predicted while fewer occur. Global temperatures declined as much in the first few months of 2008 as they increased in the previous 100 plus years due to warming. Recently we were told global warming is causing an increase in kidney stones in a travesty of geographic correlation assuming cause and effect. One blogger who began recording, with tongue in cheek, all the events attributed to global warming was John Brignell.
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