Energetic Delusions: The Republican Energy Policy does not Survive Contact with Reality

It would be tempting to write about the Boehner of the Week but that's an activity for Sunday. Today I went car shopping, looking for a replacement for my older, slightly hungry station wagon. My choices are the Prius, the Civic Hybrid and the VW TDI Jetta, all cars with highway fuel efficiency above 50 MPG. Most notably missing from this list are any U. S. made cars. None of the folks in Detroit managed to read the tea leaves correctly and with gas going to $3.50, maybe $4.00 per gallon, they're still banking on big engines and big cars. Victims of their own actions and of Cheney's oil company brother-in-law energy policy, they founder while the wait for a Prius is at four to five months. The Civics are available with a lower wait time and the Jettas are available on the lot.

Detroit chose to use hybrid technology to boost the power of their cars. They chose poorly. The Toyota dealer today told me that Ford is buying second-generation Toyota technology. Toyota is using generation five. The national average gas price is $2.89/gallon. Part of the rise is being blamed on those of us who really don't want to drink water contaminated with cancer-causing petrochemicals such as MTBE, call us envir-wackos and chug a liter of MTBE if you want. The replacement additive is chuggable, ethanol. We could import it cheaply from Brazil but the oil and Agro-lobbies have managed to buy enough Republicans to put a heavy tariff on Brazilian ethanol. So part of your excessive gas price is going to keep Congress from allowing cheap ethanol into our country. We don't seem to be voting our own interests, do we.

Bush touts hydrogen, not conservation, as the solution to our energy problems. Hydrogen is an attractive option - it produces water when burnt but it is expensive and difficult to handle, particularly either at high pressures or as a liquid at over -400°. It's also years away at best. Some day I can envision a hydrogen-powered car in my garage and a solar-powered electrolysis device on my roof but the entire debate reveals the Republican delusion when it comes to physics. They truely seem to believe that energy can be created from nothing, that by changing the fuel you somehow reduce the amount of energy needed to propel a Hummer and that fuel is in infinite supply. I don't care how great your majority and how many justices you put on the supreme court, the laws of physics can't be amended. Technology will create ways of producing energy but we should have started years ago. Your majority has constantly supported the status-quo, a situation that invariably changes, when it comes to energy policy. You will pay the price in November.

Want to see oil prices drop like a stone? Pass a law requiring 40 MPG as the fleet average for all non-commercial vehicles and subsidize clean coal research. Our energy providers would then find ways to make their product cheaper just to stay in business. The shareholders in ExxonMobil might then even raise the percentage of the company's research into alternative energy into single digits.

Until then, the only way we can make any meaningful impact into energy prices is to conserve. Our leaders aren't providing an adequate vision concerning energy so we'll have to do it ourselves. Carpool, combine trips but use less energy. And hope to put the oil business out of the business of government in November.