“Hooked On Oil”: No Magic Bullet For The Price Of Gas
As they ruminate at the pump, Americans may have finally figured out the new global deal on gasoline: there’s no magic bullet to bring prices down as long as the United States remains hooked on oil.
No matter how many billions of dollars oil companies rake in, the world market, not individual oil producers, sets the price of oil. Likewise, there is little, if anything, U.S. presidents—or their political opponents—can do to ward off $4 per gallon gasoline.
The reality is that oil supply concerns in Iran, Nigeria, and other trouble spots married with heightened oil demand in China, India, and other burgeoning nations will largely determine what Americans pay for gasoline. We can drill doggedly in our own backyards, but the price of gasoline will remain more a matter of speculation over externally-driven factors than tapping new sources of oil at home.
America is at an oil crossroads, emotionally and financially. We can continue griping about gasoline and maintain false hopes of controlling crude oil prices. Or we can face the truth, stop subsidizing oil with hard-earned taxpayer dollars, and abandon extreme efforts in search of new oil supplies. Surviving $4 gasoline depends on sipping oil and providing fuel substitutes, not subsidizing and promoting petroleum production.
As the world’s largest oil consumer, home to a transportation system that is a whopping 94 percent dependent on oil, the United States is precariously positioned. Conventional thinking—the more we drill at home, the better off we’ll be—is dangerously misguided. No matter where in the world oil is found, the price is tied to the global market.
Moreover, much of the heavier new oil supplies found in the western hemisphere yield diesel and fuel oil that is destined primarily for export markets. New heavier oils are not well suited for consumption by American cars and jets. So drilling closer to home will do much more to pad the oil industry’s deep pockets than bring down prices at the pump.
Since business-as-usual isn’t likely the answer, and may make matters worse, it’s time for unconventional thinking.
America is desperately in need of an oil policy that reduces dependence on petroleum, regardless of the source. The more fuel efficient our cars become and the faster we diversify into new transportation fuels, the brighter our energy and economic future will be.
President Obama already set in motion the first part of the solution. Tomorrow’s cars and trucks will consume less fuel than those they replace. And despite rising gas prices—or perhaps because of it—automakers’ new vehicle line-ups contain some of the most fuel-efficient vehicles in industry history.
In the next five years, new cars and trucks will use 20 percent less fuel per mile driven. And by 2025, new cars will average about 50 miles per gallon, nearly double levels initially mandated for 1985. Sticking to the president’s plan, or even accelerating it, will be key.
But there is much more to be done. America can no longer rely on oil alone to fuel mobility. We need to step up the transition to oil alternatives by moving to hybrid-electric and electric vehicles, and using advanced biofuels.
Electricity can be generated by a diverse array of clean energy sources, leaving oil out of the power mix. And biofuels can be made from many different nonoil sources, including algae, grasses, woody crops, wastes, and various other nonfood feed stocks.
High gasoline prices help motivate the shift away from oil. But a market transformation will take direct policy action, for example, through a price stabilizing oil security fee or other fiscal measures. Oil is entrenched in America. Moving away from perpetual oil dependence to a robust, diversified fuel system will take clear, enduring policy action.
Americans are justifiably anxious about what the future holds when it comes to gasoline prices. But many motorists are beginning to appreciate that anger over pump prices will not relieve pain at the pump. Nor will political promises.
Oil markets have globalized to the point where prices are beyond our control. Given oil’s dangerous monopoly power over our mobility, it’s time to entirely reinvent our habits, innovate technologically, and adopt bold new policies aimed at reducing the use of oil and substituting instead of subsidizing and searching for oil. This is how America will ultimately survive $4 gasoline.
By: Deborah Gordon, U. S. News and World Report, March 22, 2012
“Attack Of The Right”: Ryan Budget A Disappointment To Conservatives
The conservative group Club for Growth said Wednesday that a Republican House budget plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) is a “disappointment” to fiscal conservatives that falls short of making necessary cuts to balance the nation’s budget.
The group’s president said in a statement that Ryan’s plan does not put the country on a path to chop deficits quickly enough.
Chris Chocola also complained that that the budget largely waives massive cuts that are set to go into effect in January as a consequence for the failure of Congress’s special deficit reduction “supercommittee.”
According to the Budget Control Act — the hard-fought law that raised the nation’s debt ceiling over the summer — failure of the supercommittee was to trigger about $1.2 trillion in cuts over the next decade, split between military and domestic spending.
In Ryan’s budget, the so-called sequester–deeply unpopular to Republicans because of its powerful hit to defense–would be replaced. Tackling only the first year of the cuts—about $110 billion—his budget calls for instructing Congressional committees to come up with $18 billion in trims the first year and $116 billion over five years.
“It is hard to have confidence that our long-term fiscal challenges will be met responsibly when the same Congress that passed the Budget Control Act wants to ignore it less than one year later. On balance, the Ryan Budget is a disappointment for fiscal conservatives,” Chocola said in a statement.
Ryan’s budget also seeks to eliminate deficits by 2040. The Club for Growth has called for a budget that balances within the decade. Chocola said the budget contains “several important reforms and pro-growth policies” but is not enough.
“The Club for Growth urges Republicans to support a budget that balances in the near future and complies with the Budget Control Act,” he said.
The attack from the right comes as Ryan is facing a far more vigorous outcry from Democrats—who believe this plan slashes programs for the poor and elderly even while cutting taxes for the wealthy.
They have also complained that the Ryan plan slices agency budgets by $18 billion more than a year-long cap agreed to in the debt deal—a key concession made to conservatives whom Ryan will need to get his budget plan through the House.
With Democrats unified against Ryan’s plan, the Club for Growth statement could pose problems for its passage in the House if it persuades the GOP’s restive caucus to waver in its support.
Some centrist Republicans are also anxious about Ryan’s plan—fearful it will set the House on a path to another nasty clash with the Senate just weeks before the November election.
By: Rosalind S. Helderman, The Washington Post, March 21, 2012
“Unprincipled Fraud”: Mitt Romney And GOP Wiping The Slate Clean
By sheer coincidence, my nine-year-old begged me just the other day to buy him one of those iconic toys from my own childhood, the Etch-A-Sketch, which is manufactured by that equally quirky and iconic toymaker, Ohio Art.
And so, thanks to my son, I am now equipped to pile on like everyone else onto Mitt Romney’s PR wingman, Eric Fehrnstrom.
Fehrnstrom, as by now everyone with access to YouTube surely knows, famously replied when asked by CNN’s John Fugelsang how Romney intended to pivot from the Republican primary to the general election: “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”
It was a stunning, perhaps catastrophic mistake. Rachel Maddow called it the gaffe of what has been a gaffe-laden campaign. Not only was Fehrnstrom’s answer supercilious and snarky. It also fed into one of the central narratives against Romney in this campaign, namely that he is an unprincipled fraud who will do or say anything to be president. And now Romney’s top aide has said he agrees. On the record!
Eric Fehrnstrom is living every press secretary’s and publicity agent’s worst nightmare. He’s not only given his guy’s enemies a talking point they can use against him. He’s given them a talking point with props!
I never much cared for the Etch-A-Sketch myself. I quickly tired of the toy once I discovered the best I could do by twisting its two white knobs was to produce a tedious succession of boxes and big city skylines. But somehow I am guessing that between now and next November Ohio Art’s signature product will be the toy the political world just can’t put down.
As Timothy Noah of New Republic says, Fehrnstrom may have just committed “America’s first multi-platform gaffe.”
What makes it so new and different, says Noah, “is its extreme ripeness for visual exploitation at the virtual dawn of a new era of social networking on proliferating varieties of gadgets.”
Normally when a candidate or top aide commits a gaffe, says Noah, it enters some vast “echo chamber” either of words or images and is quickly forgotten as other words and images overwhelm and take its place.
But Noah says the Etch-A-Sketch gaffe is different. It provides endless possibilities for parody and visual mockery using an image familiar to most Americans to say something about Mitt Romney that has the virtue of being fundamentally true: that he’s a fake, a fraud, untrue, what you see today is not what you get tomorrow. And that, says Noah, is a “fatally candid” combination.
As it turns out, I know Eric Fehrnstrom pretty well from our days in the Massachusetts State House Press Gallery when Eric covered politics for the right-leaning Boston Herald when Mike Dukakis was Governor.
Our paths crossed again when Eric was State Treasurer Joe Malone’s press guy in the early 1990s and again when Fehrnstrom ran the communications shop for then-Governor Romney.
I’m also guessing that despite the sort of grim sympathy a herd of wildebeest has for one of its own being devoured by a pride of lions, Massachusetts own political herd is no doubt watching the hard-ball playing Fehrnstrom being devoured today and is thinking to itself: This couldn’t be happening to a nicer wise-guy.
But Fehrnstrom is simply too experienced a media pro for me to believe his epic gaffe occurred just because he’d let down his guard while savoring the satisfaction of another primary win. Something this big and stupid has to be cultural.
And in reaching for the Etch-a-Sketch metaphor, Fehrnstrom was only doing instinctively what the Republican Party has been doing deliberately ever since George W. Bush ended his disastrous eight-year reign, which is to wipe the historical slate clean and forget all about it so that everything that’s gone wrong before or since can be blamed on Barack Obama.
Fehrnstrom’s cynical response on CNN is nothing more than of a piece with a Republican presidential campaign and a Republican Party that is steeped in cynicism and betrays a contempt for facts, a contempt for truth, a contempt for principled consistency, a contempt for American traditions and institutions and a P.T. Barnum-like contempt for the average American voter that you’d expect from a party that thinks it’s found the secret to creating its own reality.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, Salon, March 22, 2012
“He’ll Do What He’s Told”: Conservatives Prepare to Boss Mitt Romney Around
Alexis Levinson of The Daily Caller has a short item up where she interviews some of the executive officers of FreedomWorks about a possible Mitt Romney presidency. They are remarkably sanguine about the possibility:
In a sit down with The Daily Caller, FreedomWorks Chief Operating Office and Treasurer Ryan Hecker, and Executive Director Russ Walker, explained that they were focused on their “Senate strategy” — getting strong conservatives into the Senate who can work with the House conservatives to drive an agenda, regardless of who is in office.
Most Americans assume that leadership in the country comes from the Presidency downwards. Freedomworks thinks it can come from the Congress and that Romney’s actual political opinions are irrelevant:
“The smaller-government movement has always looked for the man or the woman on the white horse to come in, take the presidency and move good policy. And the truth is, you can’t do it without a caucus within the Senate and the House that’s willing to move that same policy,” Walker said. “And our perspective is that if we build that caucus … that they will push good policy to the president regardless of who’s [in the White House].”
The most stunning part has to be when Freedomworks explains what they think will make Romney a historic president:
“My hope is that fifty years from now, someone is going to write a biography and it’s going to be known that Romney was one of the most conservative presidents in American history, and a conservative hero,” Hecker echoed. “And it’s going to be because a conservative Senate put bills in front of him that he signed.”
He joked that fifty years from now, Romney, who is currently being slammed for his political flip-flops, would have “a monument in D.C. or something because of his conservative bona fides.”
What would a monument to political obsequiousness look like?
This sentiment coming from Freedomworks may have first been expressed by Grover Norquist at CPAC. Clearly, the mood is spreading. Expect more conservative organizations and pundits to get the memo as it becomes obvious that Romney is going to be the nominee.
It will be a pretty interesting pitch: “Vote for Romney: He’ll Do What He’s Told.”
By: Noah Kristula-Green, The Daily Beast, March 22, 2012
“But For The Rest Of The Story”: Romney “Etches” Out History Of The Bush Wall Street Bailout
Answering critics who are gleefully calling him the the Etch A Sketch candidate, Mitt Romney stood fast on one of his long-held positions Wednesday, defending George W. Bush’s financial bailout of Wall Street in 2008. That might be considered a rather gutsy stand, considering that Bush has been persona non grata among Republicans in this campaign, the conservative base despises the policy and Romney’s chief rival for the presidential nomination, Rick Santorum, has condemned the bailout as unnecessary and “injurious to capitalism.”
And what Romney said is at least partly true: almost every mainstream economist agrees that had there not been a bailout, the entire U.S. financial system would have collapsed and the nation would very likely be in the middle of a second Great Depression right now.
But in his remarks in Maryland, Romney also ignored–or etched out–much of the financial history that led to the bailout. “I keep hearing the president say that he’s responsible for keeping America from going into a Great Depression,” Romney said. “No, no, no. That was President George W. Bush and [then Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson that stepped in and kept that from happening.”
Umm, yeah, they did, but only after Paulson, as head of Goldman Sachs, lobbied to raise leverage limits that fueled Wall Street’s untrammeled risk-taking machine and after Bush, for eight years, sponsored low-income housing and deregulatory policies that promoted the illusory idea of a self-stabilizing Wall Street, gutted the financial regulatory system and set the stage for the disaster.
It is little remembered today that President Bush was so completely flummoxed by the financial collapse that, according to his own former speechwriter, Matt Latimer, he didn’t seem to comprehend at first what had happened, nor that the Treasury was planning to pay more for Wall Street’s toxic securities than they were really worth in order to sustain the reckless banks. “Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” he told Latimer plaintively. Just before the crash, Bush had hoped to deliver a series of “legacy speeches” touting his accomplishments, including a robust economy.
Romney, in his remarks, may have been just sketching out how he plans to run in the fall–as well as conveniently reminding voters of the story he hoped would dominate the news yesterday, that George W. Bush’s prominent brother, Jeb, had just endorsed him. But that’s no excuse for etching out the real story of what happened.
By: Michael Hirsh, National Journal, March 22, 2012
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