I read in the paper today that the GOP wants to become the environmentally friendly party. Hilariously, they want to do this by drilling for more oil.
Senate Republicans aim to undercut Democrats’ claim to be the environmentally conscious party by combining their own conservation message [sic] with a longstanding push for more oil drilling. [...]
The Republican proposal also calls for moving away from the party’s bedrock position of emphasizing oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness and instead promoting oil-shale extraction and offshore exploration.
Drilling for oil in the Alaskan wildlife refuge has become something of a shibboleth, more important as a marker to show that you care about the natural world than as policy position that will have any long-term impact on the country.
John McCain likes to pretend that drilling in ANWR will lower gas prices, benefit the American people, and put the country on a path to more sustainable energy use. It will do none of those things of course, but there’s really no reason not to drill in ANWR, as long as the drilling is regulated and held to the appropriate standards of environmental responsibility.(*)
Oil companies are getting pretty good at getting oil out of the ground with a fairly small environmental footprint, if only because we’ve forced them to. Better to get the oil from a desolate, out-of-the-way tundra than from coastal areas that are more populated and more traveled by both people and wildlife, or from oil-shale extraction sites that are hugely more destructive than traditional oil wells.
The GOP is moving away from a “drill in ANWR” position that benefits no one except the oil industry (and for which they have been getting hammered in the court of public opinion), towards a position that benefits no one except the oil industry, while harming the tourism industry, the fishing industry, and the environment. But oil-shale extraction and off-shore drilling are not yet as unpopular as drilling in ANWR, because they’ve just started talking about them, and they’re pretending that they will lower gas prices. Give it a little bit of time. This is still the strategy of a 29% party.
Other Republican proposals include taxpayer subsidies for nuclear power companies to build more nuclear plants, taxpayer subsidies for coal companies to work on carbon sequestration, and refusing to subsidize renewable energy development on the grounds that it’s fiscally irresponsible. (**)
Not all of these things are bad ideas, but they’re certainly not good ideas. Insofar as there is a fixed pot of federal money available for cleaning up the environment, stopping global warming, and creating a sustainable energy infrastructure, the GOP’s spending priorities represent a very poor return on our investment. (***)
Nevertheless, if the Republican Party has embraced the idea of rhetorically giving a shit about the environment, I applaud them. It will make it much easier to build a political consensus for action, and make it much easier to get the few moderate Republicans we’ll need to break GOP filibusters on legislation that will actually help.
(*) Not that we should open up ANWR for oil extraction and give it to the oil companies for free, but it’s something that I’d be happy to trade away in return for some Republican votes on a cap-and-trade or carbon tax bill, or as part of a wide-ranging mass-transit improvement plan.
(**) It’s this kind of straight talk about fiscal discipline that makes Saint John McCain such a model of integrity.
(***) It does offer a better ROI than we’re getting from the “stay in Iraq until the violence stops, and then stay there for a hundred more years” strategy. But then again, so does burning dollar bills for heat.