Obama Compromising With Himself on Energy, Again

In March 2010, President Obama came out for increased oil drilling. Result? He won over exactly no one to his clean energy & climate plan, and had to publicly reverse himself after the Gulf oil disaster.

Obama also promised massive subsidies for nuclear power plants. Result? The senators he was trying to win over, Lindsey Graham and John McCain, walked away from the clean energy & climate bill anyway, and now Obama is faced with the prospect of yet another public reversal after the Japanese nuclear disaster.

Now it looks like President Obama is once again giving up ground on energy with no guarantee of anything in return:

Many facets of his program will be familiar. The president will propose wider use of natural gas, including incentives to use it to fuel fleet vehicles such as city buses. He will back greater production of biofuels and will vow to establish at least four commercial-scale refineries producing cellulosic ethanol or advanced biofuels within the next two years. He also will pledge to establish higher fuel-efficiency standards for heavy trucks, just as he did for passenger vehicles early in his administration.

Obama will also urge oil companies to make greater use of the federal leases both onshore and offshore to prop up domestic oil output. The oil industry and GOP lawmakers have been loudly complaining about delays in the permitting of offshore drilling in recent months. But an irked administration, which had pledged tougher scrutiny of drilling applications after last year’s massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, fired back Tuesday with an Interior Department report that revived earlier debates about whether oil companies were exploiting the leases they already have.

There are some good ideas, like increased fuel efficiency for trucks. But they're more than outweighed by the bad ones:

• We've already been drilling for more oil recently under the failed Bush/Cheney energy policies. And how are gas prices doing?
• Natural gas may be less polluting than oil at the tailpipe, but comes with major concerns about the safety of a drilling procedure called fracking.
• And politicians have been touting next-generation biofuels for ... well, for a generation. Now it's 2011 and they're still not ready. Why throw more money down that hole when wind, solar and electric cars are ready now?

For all these giveaways, what exactly does the White House expect to get? Does anyone expect Congress to get off its butt and act on energy when GOP leaders seem happy to cash polluter checks and blame others for our national energy inaction?

In the face of Congressional inaction, President Obama should be defining the choice for voters. They're for buying more polluting oil from countries that hate us - I'm for making America more self-sufficient with home-made clean energy. If voters want the latter, they need to not only give Obama another term, but give him a Congress that will pass real reform.

Instead, we get more White House attempts to negotiate with people who want them to fail, and more "me too" energy policy, always a disaster for Democrats.

Have national Democratic leaders learned nothing from the 2009 & 2010 elections? Seems like they think the lesson is they haven't compromised enough, adopted GOP-lite stances enough, or depressed the progressive base enough. Sounds like a perfect prescription for more of the same on energy, and more of the same in the 2011 & 2012 elections.

Have Vehicle Fuels Advanced Since "The Dukes of Hazzard"?

When The Green Miles was 5, I was a huge Dukes of Hazzard fan. So when I couldn't find anything to watch the other night & an episode was just starting, I figured what the heck.

The episode, titled High Octane, features the Duke family entering an alternative fuel contest sponsored by the Department of Energy. They submit a batch of Uncle Jesse's moonshine whiskey & the judge not only gives him top prize, but pronounces it the best tasting fuel and/or whiskey he's ever had.

But shortly after the episode aired, oil prices came back down, President Reagan took office and slashed incentives for alternative energy & conservation, and vehicle fuels have puttered in neutral ever since. We're still putting gas or the equally-bad corn ethanol in our vehicles. And our cars & trucks don't get much better gas mileage than they did in the days of the General Lee:

Fortunately, President Obama has taken bold moves to change that, pushing for significantly higher fuel efficiency standards. The new rules will save 2 billion barrels of oil.

That 2 billion barrels works out to 40 billion gallons of gas. At $3 a gallon, that's enough to buy Americans 8 billion bottles of whiskey. Seems a much better use of the money, don't you think?

Side note: Now I know why my parents refused to watch the Dukes of Hazzard with me. Felt like they only had enough plot for 15 minutes & the writers did all they could to stretch it to an hour. I've seen dogs being taken to the vet that dragged their feet less. Also, fun to watch the General Lee jumps again. Seemed completely plausible when I was 5.

Why Biofuels? Because the Sun Can't Vote.

Politicians love them some biofuel. Helps farmers! Promotes energy independence! Cuts our greenhouse gas emissions!

Except the evidence is piling up that the last part just isn't true. In fact, most of today's generation of biofuels are actually increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Why? While biofuels emit less CO2 when they're burned, it's their production that's the problem:

Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel.

“When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially,” said Timothy Searchinger, lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University. “Previously there’s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis.”

These plant-based fuels were originally billed as better than fossil fuels because the carbon released when they were burned was balanced by the carbon absorbed when the plants grew. But even that equation proved overly simplistic because the process of turning plants into fuels causes its own emissions — for refining and transport, for example.

The clearance of grassland releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land, said Joseph Fargione, lead author of the second paper, and a scientist at the Nature Conservancy.

Why do we even need biofuels? Why can't we just focus on solar, wind and tidal power and make every car a plug-in hybrid, all using technology that's already available?

Oh, right. Politicians don't pander to the planet because the sun, wind and water can't vote. Farmers can. So we get policies that benefit farmers at the cost of the planet.