Newt Targets The Volt

In his latest attempt to distinguish himself from both President Obama and his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich blasted the President's transportation and energy policy while campaigning in Oklahoma by claiming it was anti-American to encourage the development of electric cars and more fuel-efficient conventional vehicles when the free market has shown a clear preference for light trucks, preferring instead to drill for more oil to increase the supply of gasoline and bring gas prices down (although American oil would be sold on the global market and have no effect on gas prices home). He drew numerous cheers from the hayseeds he was addressing when he added, "You cannot put a gun rack on a Volt."

It's easy to attack General Motors after it used its government loans to develop an electric Chevy that costs almost as much as an entry-level Cadillac and has had teething problems in its early stages. Also, anyone who needs a gun rack on his vehicle wouldn't buy one anyway. But it's weird that Gingrich would complain about so much money spent on helping American car companies develop electric cars when, as Michigan Live's Jeff Wattrick is ready to remind us, Newt wants a lunar base that would be more expensive and yield fewer consumer-friendly benefits. Newt also says he would prefer to spend the subsidy on helping Americans who can't afford a Volt to buy a cheaper used car - preferably a pickup, I'm sure.

Okay. Never mind that a subsidy for a used car would make it less necessary for GM to sell a new car and make it less necessary for GM to keep as many dealerships as they have remaining after the mass dealership closures of 2009. Yes, GM is making smaller cars, but they've been making small cars since the late seventies. That includes the downsizing of their larger cars in response to rising gas prices; the big sedans GM used to make before the 1973 oil crisis bear no resemblance to their largest sedans of today. The current crop of GM's largest cars are two feet shorter than the big sedans they were making forty years ago - because the free market demanded smaller (but not necessarily small) cars. And yes, the Volt costs nearly $40,000, but new technologically advanced products always cost a lot when first introduced. As they technology becomes more mainstream, the price of the product comes down. DVD players, after all, were very expensive when they first went on the market in 1997. Now they're so cheap that even CVS can sell them.

And, true, more people have bought pickups and SUVs in the past twenty years rather than small cars, but no one is stopping Detroit from making them. And if you do need a vehicle that can bear a gun rack, you can still buy a Chevrolet Silverado pickup.

Oh, and, by the way, while you can't put a gun rack on a Volt, you can put a gun rack in a Volt:

Happy driving!

Oil Pan

I tuned in to President Obama's speech about the Gulf of Mexico last night expecting a major address that would join John F. Kennedy's Cuban Missile Crisis speech of 1962 and Ronald Reagan's Challenger speech of 1986 among the memorable Oval Office addresses in the history of American television. What I got was something that kind of reminded me of that 1989 address by George Bush when he held up a bag of crack to underscore the seriousness of illegal drugs and didn't say much.

President Obama made a strong case for going against BP in getting them to clean up and pay for their oil leak, but when it came to explaining how we as a nation would get through this mess and how we would chart a new course in terms of an energy policy, Obama offered new specifics and plenty of vagaries, re-iterating his commitment to a green economy and evading the question of whether or not he would support carbon taxes and "cap and trade" gas emission regulation in an energy bill that has stalled in the Senate over these two issues.

In short, anyone expecting a bold new energy policy initiative that would take a lot of political will to put across was bitterly disappointed. I was. So were a lot of people; the Republicans accused Obama of platitudinous posturing, and progressives bemoaned the lack of specifics in the speech about how we were going to make the transition to clean energy. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) even expressed disappointment in Obama's failure to mention proposals Republicans can get behind, such as nuclear energy and electric cars.

Pundits and politicians panned this speech as unanimously as popular music critics would pan a Michael Bolton album. The White House said this speech wasn't intended for pundits and politicians, but I can only wonder who was meant for. It was probably meant for religious fishermen, if Obama's reference to the annual blessings of fishing fleets in Louisiana were any indication, and he even invoked God in the hope that we could set things right.

With President Norman Vincent Obama having spoken, it seems our only hope of getting any energy legislation passed this year or any year is letting Congress pass a bill so weak, it will do for energy policy what the health care reform law did for that issue. That is, not much.

And the green economy? We have one already. But it's cold cash, not photosynthesis, that makes our economy green.

You Know The Drill

I wish this were an April Fool's Day joke, but it's really true that President Obama is opening the waters off the southern Atlantic coast of the United States, parts of the Arctic Ocean, and the eastern Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil drilling. He says it will help the economy and produce more jobs. Did a Sarah Palin mole replace environmental employment expert Van Jones as a White House point man on energy policy?

President Obama defended his decision as being part of a wider picture, saying that the United states needs to consider all possible energy sources -not just renewable ones - as part of a broad strategic plan to make itself independent of foreign energy sources. But what's to be gained from going from a dependence on foreign oil to a dependence on domestic oil? It's still more of a dependence on oil, and it gives us an excuse to continue an oil-based living pattern, encouraging more cars, more large cars and SUVs, more pollution, and more suburban sprawl. We don't need more oil. We need more biofuels, solar power, wind power, and, if there really is such a thing as clean coal, more of that. The jury is still out on natural gas.

We don't need the sprawl more oil will encourage, but rather, more walkable neighborhoods and towns. We need more mass transit, more small cars, and a gasoline tax to encourage such a living pattern. This decision by the President will just make our suburban lifestyle, with all of the driving and petrochemically grown foodstuffs that support it, last a little longer.

Many Democratic lawmakers, such as Senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, are opposed to this plan, afraid of oil spills polluting their states's beaches. Southern politicians support it, even those from would-be affected Southern coastal states. Good, I hope they get gobs of oil on their private beaches. To be fair, President Obama excluded the pristine Bristol Bay off the southwestern coast of Alaska and all of the Pacific coastline of the continental U.S. (which includes the Democratic states of Washington, Oregon, and California). The President sought to strike a balance in the quest for a compromise. But as the deals over the extension of slavery proved, compromises usually resolve nothing. They just perpetuate bad situations that can erupt into something worse.

Isn't there anyone advising the President on a green economy right now? Not likely. If there were, Glenn Beck would have hounded him out of office just like he did to Van Jones.