“Natural Born Drillers”: Republicans Are Just Plain “Full Of Gas”
To be a modern Republican in good standing, you have to believe — or pretend to believe — in two miracle cures for whatever ails the economy: more tax cuts for the rich and more drilling for oil. And with prices at the pump on the rise, so is the chant of “Drill, baby, drill.” More and more, Republicans are telling us that gasoline would be cheap and jobs plentiful if only we would stop protecting the environment and let energy companies do whatever they want.
Thus Mitt Romney claims that gasoline prices are high not because of saber-rattling over Iran, but because President Obama won’t allow unrestricted drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile, Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal tells readers that America as a whole could have a jobs boom, just like North Dakota, if only the environmentalists would get out of the way.
The irony here is that these claims come just as events are confirming what everyone who did the math already knew, namely, that U.S. energy policy has very little effect either on oil prices or on overall U.S. employment. For the truth is that we’re already having a hydrocarbon boom, with U.S. oil and gas production rising and U.S. fuel imports dropping. If there were any truth to drill-here-drill-now, this boom should have yielded substantially lower gasoline prices and lots of new jobs. Predictably, however, it has done neither.
Why the hydrocarbon boom? It’s all about the fracking. The combination of horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing of shale and other low-permeability rocks has opened up large reserves of oil and natural gas to production. As a result, U.S. oil production has risen significantly over the past three years, reversing a decline over decades, while natural gas production has exploded.
Given this expansion, it’s hard to claim that excessive regulation has crippled energy production. Indeed, reporting in The Times makes it clear that U.S. policy has been seriously negligent — that the environmental costs of fracking have been underplayed and ignored. But, in a way, that’s the point. The reality is that far from being hobbled by eco-freaks, the energy industry has been given a largely free hand to expand domestic oil and gas production, never mind the environment.
Strange to say, however, while natural gas prices have dropped, rising oil production and a sharp fall in import dependence haven’t stopped gasoline prices from rising toward $4 a gallon. Nor has the oil and gas boom given a noticeable boost to an economic recovery that, despite better news lately, has been very disappointing on the jobs front.
As I said, this was totally predictable.
First up, oil prices. Unlike natural gas, which is expensive to ship across oceans, oil is traded on a world market — and the big developments moving prices in that market usually have little to do with events in the United States. Oil prices are up because of rising demand from China and other emerging economies, and more recently because of war scares in the Middle East; these forces easily outweigh any downward pressure on prices from rising U.S. production. And the same thing would happen if Republicans got their way and oil companies were set free to drill freely in the Gulf of Mexico and punch holes in the tundra: the effect on prices at the pump would be negligible.
Meanwhile, what about jobs? I have to admit that I started laughing when I saw The Wall Street Journal offering North Dakota as a role model. Yes, the oil boom there has pushed unemployment down to 3.2 percent, but that’s only possible because the whole state has fewer residents than metropolitan Albany — so few residents that adding a few thousand jobs in the state’s extractive sector is a really big deal. The comparable-sized fracking boom in Pennsylvania has had hardly any effect on the state’s overall employment picture, because, in the end, not that many jobs are involved.
And this tells us that giving the oil companies carte blanche isn’t a serious jobs program. Put it this way: Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment. So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke.
Why, then, are Republicans pretending otherwise? Part of the answer is that the party is rewarding its benefactors: the oil and gas industry doesn’t create many jobs, but it does spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign contributions. The rest of the answer is simply the fact that conservatives have no other job-creation ideas to offer.
And intellectual bankruptcy, I’m sorry to say, is a problem that no amount of drilling and fracking can solve.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 15, 2012
Why Gas Prices Aren’t Likely To Decide The 2012 Election
This morning’s Washington Post-ABC poll shows that President Obama’s poll numbers are falling in tandem with rising gas prices. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they disapprove of how he’s handling the situation at the pump. Could gas prices end up swaying the 2012 election after all?
It’s hard to rule anything out, but evidence remains thin that gasoline will be a determining factor in November. While Americans love to grumble about expensive gasoline — and with good reason — political science research suggests that it’s not the main thing that shifts votes. Nate Silver, for one, has found that “there’s not a lot of evidence that oil prices are all that important” a factor in presidential elections. Nor do gasoline prices necessarily dictate the public’s view of the White House: Back during George W. Bush’s presidency, there was a much-linked graph showing his approval ratings climbing and dipping in lockstep with gas prices. But subsequent analysis by political scientist Brendan Nyhan showed that the correlation was just a “statistical artifact.”
The more severe worry for Obama, at this point, is that soaring gas prices could stomp on the nascent economic recovery. The way this typically happens is that pricey gasoline starts crimping the checkbooks of U.S. consumers, who then have less money to spend on other things. (In the Post-ABC poll, most respondents said they were already feeling the pinch.) That leads to slower growth. And slower growth, political scientists agree, really can sink a presidency. As Silver puts it, “higher gas prices are important to the extent that they affect things like G.D.P., inflation and unemployment. But there isn’t evidence that they matter above and beyond that.”
That said, it’s not yet clear whether oil prices actually will crush the current recovery. There’s certainly reason for concern: James Hamilton, an economist at UC San Diego, has found that most U.S. recessions since World War II have been preceded by a sharp run-up in oil prices. But, oddly enough, one person who isn’t gloomy about our current predicament is Hamilton himself. “I find myself in the unusual position,” he recently wrote, “of being less concerned about the impact of oil prices on the U.S. economy than many other analysts.” Hamilton notes that, for now, oil prices are simply moving back to 2011 levels. And price increases that simply reverse earlier declines are less harmful than historic new highs.
For instance, high oil prices have historically inflicted disproportionate harm on the U.S. economy by leading to a cut-back in sales of SUVs and other inefficient vehicles that Detroit has long specialized in. But this time around, he notes, sales are holding steady — perhaps because U.S. automakers have shifted to selling fuel-efficient models. Moreover, low natural gas prices, a warm winter, and improved fuel efficiency have helped insulate U.S. consumers from pricey oil to date. Overall energy expenditures are actually down this year. Americans have been grappling with expensive oil for several years now, and they appear to be adapting.
That should come as a quiet relief to most incumbent politicians. Because the unsatisfying reality is that there’s not a whole lot the White House or Congress can actually do to lower gasoline prices. Oil prices are skyrocketing because global crude supplies remain tight and tensions with Iran are making traders skittish about a possible conflict in a crucial oil-producing region. If Obama could figure out a way to calm down the situation with Iran, that might cause crude prices to settle back down.
But apart from that, options are limited. More domestic drilling won’t bring back $2.50-per-gallon gas, as Newt Gingrich has suggested — oil prices are dictated by the vast world market, of which U.S. production is just a small fraction. The still-in-limbo Keystone XL pipeline is just as likely to raise gasoline prices in the Midwest as anything else. Cracking down on “financial speculators,” as many Democrats have called for, isn’t particularly promising, as many oil traders simply appear to be following fundamentals. And, judging by past experience, releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve won’t offer much more than very short-lived relief. Meanwhile, Americans are becoming significantly more oil efficient, but that’s a slow, painstaking process.
That won’t stop politicians from talking about the issue. And it won’t stop Americans from expressing their disapproval. But those are two very different things from swaying an election.
Update: Here’s another notable aspect of the Post-ABC poll to consider, pointed out to me by Third Way’s Josh Freed. At the moment, 63 percent of Americans say that gas prices are causing them financial hardship, with 36 percent saying the gas squeeze is causing “serious” financial hardship. (See Question 11.) But those are actually the lowest hardship numbers since May of 2008 — and, in fact, it’s virtually identical to what Americans were saying in May of 2004, six months before George W. Bush won re-election.
By: Brad Plumer, The Washington Post, March 12, 2012
“Flawed Advice”: Usual GOP Suspects Beating The Drum For Another Ill-Advised Middle East War
It’s hard to believe, especially after the tragic decision to invade Iraq over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, that the Republican candidates for president and even the Republican candidates for Wisconsin’s soon-to-be-vacant U.S. Senate seat appear all to be on the same page — we’ve got to attack Iran to prevent the country from developing a nuclear weapon.
This, despite everyone from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the heads of this country’s intelligence agencies insisting that attacking Iran would be a foolish thing for the United States — or Israel, for that matter — to do.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, claims that despite all the rhetoric that emanates from Iran, “We are of the opinion that Iran is a rational actor.” But, if Iran is attacked, the results would destabilize not only that country, but the entire region, he said in a CNN interview.
An attack on Iran would “guarantee that which we are trying to prevent: an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon,” former CIA chief Michael Hayden commented last month, adding that the intelligence community isn’t at all sure that Iran is even trying to build an atomic bomb.
In a report last week in The New York Times, U.S. intelligence analysts say they continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear weapon. Yes, the country seems to be preserving its options to build a bomb, they admit, but that decision has been put off for sometime in the future, they believe.
Ron Burgess, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress that “the agency assesses Iran is unlikely to initiate or provoke a conflict.” Even Meir Deagan, who headed Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad until last year warns that attacking Iran “would mean regional war, and in that case you would have given Iran the best possible reason to continue the nuclear program.”
Peter Beinart of the Web magazine the Daily Beast remarked: “I’ve never seen a more lopsided debate among the experts paid to make these judgments. Yet it barely matters. So far, the Iran debate has been a rout, with the Republican presidential candidates loudly declaring their openness to war and President Obama unwilling to even echo the skepticism of his own security chiefs.”
Yes, the usual suspects are all there, from Elliott Abrams to John Bolton, the same neo-cons who sold us on Iraq, pounding the drums to once again attack another Mideastern country, apparently not learning anything from the a 10-year war that cost America trillions of dollars and many thousands of dead and maimed young people.
“How can it be, less than a decade after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that the Iran debate is breaking down along largely the same lines?” asked Beinart.
What would make it worse is if the country once again accepts their flawed advice.
By: Dave Zweifel, Editor Emeritus, The Capital Times, March 9, 2012
Republican “Field Of Hawks”: Apocalyptic And Less Than Forthright Rhetoric
Unless Ron Paul somehow wins the nomination, it looks as if a vote for the Republican presidential candidate this fall will be a vote for war with Iran.
No other conclusion can be drawn from parsing the candidates’ public remarks. Paul, of course, is basically an isolationist who believes it is none of our business if Iran wants to build nuclear weapons. He questions even the use of sanctions, such as those now in force. But Paul has about as much chance of winning the GOP nomination as I do.
Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have all sought to portray President Obamaas weak on national security — a traditional Republican line of attack. They have tried to accuse Obama of being insufficiently committed to Israel’s defense. In the process, they’ve made bellicose pledges about Iran that almost surely would lead straight to conflict.
Santorum’s apocalyptic rhetoric about Iran practically takes for granted an imminent clash. Gingrich would essentially abdicate the decision to Israeli leaders, giving them the green light for an attack whenever they choose.
Romney, the likely nominee, has been somewhat more circumspect — and less forthright. He published an op-ed in The Post this week blasting Obama’s foreign policy as “feckless” and promising that, under a Romney administration, things would be different. He then went on to outline the steps he would take in dealing with Iran — most of which turn out to be steps Obama has already taken.
“I will press for ever-tightening sanctions.” Check. “I will speak out on behalf of the cause of democracy in Iran and support Iranian dissidents.” Check. “I will make clear that America’s commitment to Israel’s security and survival is absolute.” Check. “I will buttress my diplomacy with a military option.” Check.
Romney’s only new initiatives would be to make Jerusalem the destination of his first foreign trip and to deploy an additional aircraft carrier group in the region. I imagine the intent would be to show Iranian leaders that they are isolated and under siege, but I think they get that already.
In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — a pro-Israel lobbying group — Romney was much more specific in establishing his bottom line: “We must not allow Iran to have the bomb or the capacity to make a bomb.” It is difficult to imagine how this statement can lead anywhere but to war.
U.S. policy under Obama — and previous administrations — has been that it is “unacceptable” for Iran to have nuclear weapons. The clear implication is that, while military force is an option that could be employed at any time, including the present, force will be employed if Iran tries to make a bomb.
To say that Iran must never have “the capacity to make a bomb,” as Romney does, is to draw a line that has already been crossed.
Does capacity mean having the fuel for a bomb? Iran knows how to produce the enriched uranium that would be used in a bomb, and while U.S. air power alone — unsupported by ground troops — could destroy or damage most of the enrichment facilities we know about, the Iranians could have the program back up and running within a few years.
Does capacity mean the expertise necessary to construct a bomb that would actually explode? If so, will Romney order an attack whenever intelligence agencies report that a librarian at some Iranian university has ordered a textbook in advanced metallurgy from Amazon.com?
The truth is that every nation with sufficient wealth and scientific infrastructure has the capacity to build a bomb if it really wants to. An attack is likely to increase the Iranian regime’s resolve, not lessen it. Bombing Iran every few years is not a realistic option and in any event would not be effective in the long run; when the Iranians rebuild their facilities, they will surely do a better job of hiding and bunkering them.
The United States and its allies should seek to eliminate the Iranian government’s will to make a bomb, not its capacity. I hope Romney realizes that, while sanctions and diplomacy may not be working as well as we’d like, they’re the best tools we have — and that an attack at this point gets us nowhere. But if he believes his own rhetoric, this election may be about more than the economy. It may be about war and peace.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 8, 2012
“This Is Not A Game”: The Difference A “Different Decider” Makes
We may be headed for disaster in Iran, but at least this time we may be able to have a sane debate about it.
As the bleating of the Republican war caucus gets louder and louder, it’s beginning to sound a lot like 2002, when the Bush administration was treating us to daily news about the terrifying threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, ready to incinerate us all in weeks if we didn’t launch a war. Some of the same people who made the case then are making the case now that we need to start bombing Iran. As you’re watching them, it’s hard not to shake your head and say, “Are these people insane? Do they actually believe that it’s a good idea for America to start another war in the Middle East? My god, are we getting on this train to disaster again?!?”
But before we all get too frustrated, it’s important to remember one thing: now matter how loud people like Liz Cheney may shout (and somebody please remind me why anyone should give a crap what she thinks), no matter how much infantile chest-beating we get from the Republican candidates (sample Mitt Romney quote: “I will station multiple aircraft carriers and warships at Iran’s door”), this will be a very different debate from the one we had back then. The reason is simple: We’ve got a different Decider.
It was extremely satisfying to see President Obama, at his press conference yesterday, treat the grunts of those lusting for war with Iran with something approaching the contempt they deserve:
Now, what’s said on the campaign trail — those folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities. They’re not Commander-in-Chief. And when I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war. I’m reminded that the decision that I have to make in terms of sending our young men and women into battle, and the impacts that has on their lives, the impact it has on our national security, the impact it has on our economy.
This is not a game. There’s nothing casual about it. And when I see some of these folks who have a lot of bluster and a lot of big talk, but when you actually ask them specifically what they would do, it turns out they repeat the things that we’ve been doing over the last three years, it indicates to me that that’s more about politics than actually trying to solve a difficult problem.
Now, the one thing that we have not done is we haven’t launched a war. If some of these folks think that it’s time to launch a war, they should say so. And they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be. Everything else is just talk.
There are lots of reasons to be worried about this problem, from the horrifying possibility that a President Romney would feel obliged to follow up on the absurd things he’s saying now, to the unpredictability of Israeli actions, to the potentially awful consequences of an Israeli strike that occurs with or without Washington’s approval. But whatever else happens, in this country we aren’t going to see those calling for sanity get marginalized the way they were in 2002 and 2003. In any debate, particularly one on foreign policy or matters of war, the media will define the debate by where the president and the administration stand. He’s the one with the biggest megaphone. Ten years ago, that megaphone was booming, “They’re going to kill us! Be afraid! Warwarwar!” and that became the axis around which the debate turned, enabling the people who turned out to be right to be dismissed as loons whose ideas didn’t need to be part of serious discussions about Iraq. Today that megaphone is saying—and appropriately so—”Just calm the f–k down.”
For now, anyway.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 7, 2012
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