A LOT OF GAS
by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, April 2, 2012
Last week, Mitt Romney, who, it now seems, is going to become the Republican nominee whether anybody likes it or not, called on President Barack Obama to fire three of his Cabinet members: the Energy Secretary, Steven Chu; the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar; and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson. According to Romney, the three have spent the past few years carrying out a not-so-secret plan to raise the price of gasoline at the pump. Only by firing the “gas-tax trio,” Romney told Fox News, can the President demonstrate that he did not approve of this plan. “Time for them to go,” Romney said.
Romney’s remarks came just days after Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, also on Fox, accused the Administration of driving up the cost of gas in the service of its “radical” agenda. “The reality is, gasoline prices have doubled under this President—highest prices for oil and gasoline in a hundred and fifty years,” Jindal said. “People used to think it was because of incompetence from the Obama Administration on energy. I think it’s because of ideology.” (As far as “reality” goes, Jindal’s characterization of gas prices is inaccurate; they were higher in 2008, under President George W. Bush.) Romney and Jindal, meanwhile, were echoing comments made by Newt Gingrich, who accused the President of adhering to a “radical ideology, which wants to artificially raise the cost of energy.” And Gingrich was following Rick Santorum, who, back in February, declared that Obama’s energy policies are based on a “phony theology” that “elevates the earth above man.”
Like almost anything that the Republican candidates can manage to agree on, the Obama Administration gas-price-hike conspiracy theory is nearly a hundred-per-cent hokum. The fakery begins with the theory’s premise: that the President could, if he wanted to, reduce the price of oil. Oil, as it is well known, is a global commodity traded on a global market. Gasoline prices have risen—they are up roughly fifteen per cent since the start of the year—mostly because demand is climbing in countries like China and because instability in the Middle East has prompted worries about supply. (Since sabre rattling on Iran tends to increase those worries, candidates like Santorum, who calls the Administration’s policies toward Iran “appeasement,” are almost certainly aggravating the very situation they decry.)
But an idea doesn’t have to be true, or even especially convincing, to be politically effective, and nowadays it’s the most rational policy options that seem to have the hardest time getting heard. When it comes to gas prices, it’s been clear for, well, let’s just say forever that the cost of gasoline in America is actually too low. Cheap gas generates sprawl and traffic. It discourages the use of mass transit and the development of alternative fuels. It contributes to regional smog and to global climate change. The easiest and most obvious solution has long been to raise the federal gasoline tax, which now stands at only 18.4 cents a gallon. Among economists, there’s widespread support for this idea, including from Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor who happens to be a top adviser to Romney. Writing in the Times earlier this year, Mankiw observed, “Economists who have added up all the externalities associated with driving conclude that a tax exceeding $2 a gallon makes sense.” He went on, “By taxing bad things more, we could tax good things less.”
Last week, as the Republicans continued to hammer away at the President on gas prices, he set off on an energy-themed cross-country tour. (House Speaker John Boehner dubbed it a “tour de farce.”) The tour, which coincided with a freakish March heat wave, included visits to a solar plant in Boulder City, Nevada; an oil field in Maljamar, New Mexico; and the site of a proposed pipeline in Cushing, Oklahoma. At each of these stops, Obama touted what he has taken to calling his “all-of-the-above energy strategy.” He said that he favored more domestic oil production and more solar-power installations, a cleaner environment and a stronger economy. He made much of the fact that, under his watch, domestic energy production has steadily increased and that enough new oil and gas pipeline had been laid to “encircle the earth and then some.”
“Since I took office, our dependence on foreign oil has gone down every single year,” the President said in Cushing. “Last year, we imported one million fewer barrels per day than the year before.” Obama sounded, as he generally does, thoughtful and reasonable, and the figures that he cited were, for the most part, accurate. Indeed, as the Times reported last week, dependency on foreign oil has fallen dramatically in recent years. But, in terms of what matters most, the President’s energy tour was a dispiriting affair. In the course of two days, he made four speeches. The number of times he mentioned the major impact of America’s energy use—global warming—was zero. In Oklahoma, he announced that he was expediting the construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. The announcement made no sense—except, perhaps, as political theatre. A few months ago, the Administration refused to allow construction of the pipeline’s northern leg, precisely on the ground that Republicans were trying to rush the permitting process. The whole point of the Keystone pipeline is to transport more dirty oil from Canada’s tar sands, which goes to show that you can’t be in favor of more pipelines and in favor of a cleaner environment at the same time. A smorgasbord energy strategy is, as Joe Romm observed recently on the blog Climate Progress, hardly any strategy at all: “Just a year ago, ‘all-of-the-above’ was actually a standard Republican talking point, so much so that Democrats routinely mocked it.”
What the country needs—and has always needed—is an energy policy that, instead of pandering to Americans’ sense of entitlement, would compel us finally to change our ways. In addition to a phased-in increase in the gas tax, it would include a comprehensive, economy-wide tax on carbon, or, alternatively, a cap-and-trade system. As it turns out, Mankiw isn’t the only senior person in a Republican campaign to see the importance of a new policy. When Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he presided over the introduction of one of the country’s first cap-and-trade programs, for the six largest power plants in the state. And in his book “No Apology” he wrote that “higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency.” Perhaps, once he secures the nomination, he can Etch A Sketch his way back to reality, and challenge Obama to do the same. ♦
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