John McCain has certainly scored a victory in the early primary season. This from the Associated Press:
The poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center shows nearly half of those surveyed — or 47 percent — now rate energy exploration, drilling and building new power plants as the top priority, compared with 35 percent who believed that five months earlier.
The Pew poll, conducted in late June, showed the number of people who consider energy conservation as more important declined by 10 percentage points since February from a clear majority to 45 percent. People are now about evenly split on which is more important.
And so McCain has flanked Democrats like Barack Obama stubborn over allowing new domestic drilling. People appear convinced adding more American oil to the world market would help with their energy costs. This won’t be the case, however, but McCain’s rhetoric has convinced an increasing number of people that oil derricks off Fort Lauderdale and spewing out of the Rockies is a better quick-fix rather than conservation or alternative energy development. McCain’s all for those, too, but when you’re running in an election just four months from now, Americans want to know how to stop the rising gas prices now, not five or 10 years into the future.
As I said, though, drilling for oil off America’s coasts and in places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge won’t help us save money at the pump. Period. And it won’t help us lose our addiction to foreign oil, either. As columnist Tom Teepen wrote this week:
The estimated yields of ANWR and our offshore sites would increase international supplies only about 3 percent, shaving just 13 cents or so off a gallon of gas, not for another decade at the earliest and then temporarily.
By the time the 13-cent savings reach our pocketbooks, global demand would have spiked so much it will gobble up any savings, leaving all of us back where we are right now. Even the Energy and Information Administration said any impact won’t be felt until 2030.
What doesn’t get much discussion is the mistake America made by not diversifying our transportation modes with a blend of gasoline-powered cars and some that run on electricity, hyrdogen or other alternative fuels (plus viable, affordable, attractive public transportation systems in every metro area). The result of our current fuel homogeny is our current American financial fiasco: Rearranging personal budgets to afford gasoline, less money to spend on other material goods, higher commodity prices and rising costs to produce other goods like plastics and baby oil. Drilling for additional domestic oil will not solve these problems, only exacerbate them (and line the pockets of oil companies), because when global demand grows and other developing countries want more and more of the oil pie, gas prices will continue pushing past record highs.
Developing a diversified domestic transportation system will, on the other hand, solve a lot of these problems. Imagine if you owned a car that runs on both electricity and gasoline; the rising prices wouldn’t pinch you quite as much as the people driving 12-miles-to-the-gallon SUVs. Imagine if that car operated off electricity for the first 100 or 200 miles. For those who don’t have long commutes to work, you wouldn’t have to fill up with gasoline weekly.
A lot of Americans don’t like change, but change is upon us whether we want it or not. Now comes the test of our adaptability.
