Michael O’Hare, professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, "considers himself the school’s resident expert in any subject in which
there is no such thing as real expertise (a recent project concerned
the governance and design of California county fairs)." Today, at The Reality-Based Community, that excellent group blog chaired by Mark Kleiman, O’Hare writes as the resident expert on oil, energy, political pandering, and stupidity—a congeries of topics that has spawned the absurd Republican proposal to give everybody a hundred dollars, just to assuage the pain of high gasoline prices.
Sure enough, on this particular subject, there seem to be few other experts, and none of them are in Congress or the White House. O’Hare does not suffer fools gladly, and the large number of fools clustered around the subject of expensive gasoline ratchets his rhetorical temperature up to a white-hot brilliance:
In my line of work, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about
policies that could be a lot better if they were redirected or revised
somewhat, even a lot. But the gas price story is unusual in the near
unanimity with which public figures and commentators are competing to
find a way to make things worse instead of better. I recall few debates
in which so nearly everyone isn’t just mistaken, but has the sign
wrong, looking for ways to move in precisely the wrong direction.Aside from the occasional glimmer,… the ideas in play are the most disheartening
collection of wrongheaded and ill-informed goofiness I can
recall…well, maybe abstinence-only sex education is up there.I don’t know where to start with this stuff. Hydrogen is not a fuel,
and neither is electricity. There’s no mine for either of them; if
people start plugging in cars into the wall, power plants of all kinds
will just rev up faster and longer, and the marginal electricity is
made from natural gas, a fossil fuel that’s only somewhat less
greenhousy than oil, though a lot less than coal. These cars have to
haul an enormous stack of heavy batteries around, and half the energy
that goes into the power plant is lost in the transmission and
generation system anyway. "Clean coal" doesn’t mean "coal that doesn’t
cause global warming," it means less pollution of every other kind:
coal, clean or not, is the worst greenhouse fuel until we figure out
how to capture all the stack gas and put it somewhere (this is called
carbon sequestration, and it’s a very long-term, daunting,
technological road at this point).…One doesn’t even have to wonder about the whole
concept of all the schemes to make oil less expensive; did the demand
curve for petroleum suddenly tilt the other way while we weren’t
looking? One more time, what’s the logic of subsidizing domestic
production and exploration: is there some prize for being the first
country to use up its petroleum?…Petroleum is not like solar energy. Fossil fuels are a stock, not a
flow, of sunlight that was stored up over millions of years when no-one
needed to drive kids to the soccer game. We’ve had a nice century
drawing down that bank account, and it’s over.… Of course the
beach will [be] much easier to drive to as it moves inland.What will make a difference is to use a lot less, and using less oil
means real behavioral change on a broad, retail level. It absolutely
doesn’t mean making gasoline cheaper! We’re talking about things like
living in smaller houses, close enough together to get people out on
their feet and bicycles, and into trains and trams.…We’re not talking about those things, though; we’re talking
(praying, actually) about making it not so, please. Our politics have a
long, toxic tradition of candidates’ and voters’ mutual
infantilization. The politicians treat an election, or an office, as
the worst thing one can lose, and promise to fix everything with a
trick that won’t require any actual work by us; we vote for people who
tell us fairy tales that would excuse us from any heavy lifting if they
were true, and excuse us from confronting downers and grownup
responsibilities if we pretend to believe. This game is being played at
a really frenzied level around gas prices, and the mix of ignorance and
plain mendacity both parties are wallowing in is–this is really
amazing–neck and neck with the immigration performance in the theater
next door.
Raise the gas tax. Quadruple it. That’s something Congress could do, something that would actually improve the situation. Phase it in, of course, as Jimmy Carter proposed back in days of yore, by raising it 25 cents periodically (perhaps every 6 months or so), until the true societal cost of gasoline is finally reflected in its pump price, just as it is in every other developed country. And provide targeted financial help for the poor until housing patterns and transit availability catch up with the new reality of expensive gasoline.
But a one-hundred-dollar bribe? To everyone? I think I’ll go out and buy a couple of tanksful, tanks a lot, thereby increasing demand for a product with increasingly constricted supply. Look, oil is over $70 a barrel now and will soon be $150 a barrel. Higher taxes would reduce demand and slow the inevitable continuing rise in price. As long as we have to pay dearly for gasoline, let’s give the extra money to the government to alleviate the situation (after Bush departs, anyway), rather than to the oil companies to line their pockets and empty ours.
By the way, in case it slipped by you, O’Hare actually is an expert, as well as a logical thinker and impassioned writer, so read the rest. There are other experts, too. Check out Michael Klare’s excellent book Blood and Oil and his recent article on TomDispatch, "The Permanent Energy Crisis." And then there’s Paul Roberts. He wrote The End of Oil in 2004, warning about the catastrophe of $30-a-barrel oil, and updated it in 2005, noting new peaks above $55; now that we are becoming accustomed to even more stratospheric prices ($74 today), his analysis is more crucial than ever. And his warnings. Please, class, a little logical thinking here!