The Return of ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’
With the country again facing $4-a-gallon gasoline, the time would seem ripe for a grown-up conversation on energy. What we are getting instead is a mindless rerun of the drill-baby-drill operatics of the 2008 campaign, when gas was also at $4 a gallon. Then, as now, opportunistic politicians insisted that vastly expanded oil drilling would bring relief at the pump and reduced dependence on foreign oil. Then, as now, these arguments were bogus.
As President Obama observed in a March 30 address on energy issues, drilling alone cannot possibly ensure energy independence in a country that uses one-quarter of the world’s oil while owning only 2 percent of its reserves. Nor can it lower prices, except at the margins. Only coordinated measures — greater auto efficiency, alternative fuels, improved mass transit — can address these issues.
Still the oil industry and its political allies persist in their fantasies. On Thursday, the House passed the first of three bills that will require the Interior Department to accelerate drilling permits without proper environmental or engineering reviews, reinstate lease sales off the Virginia coast that were canceled after the BP blowout, and open up protected coastal waters — East, West and in Alaska — to drilling.
The bills would make regulation of offshore drilling even weaker than it was before the spill. They would also do almost nothing to solve the problems of $4-a-gallon gas.
Here’s the hard truth: Prices are set on the world market by the major producers, OPEC in particular. Even countries that produce more oil than they need, like Canada, have little leverage. Canada’s prices track ours.
The Energy Information Agency recently projected what would happen if the nation tripled production on the outer continental shelf. There would be no price impact at all until 2020 and only 3 cents to 5 cents a gallon in 2030.
By contrast, the agency found, raising the fuel efficiency of America’s cars would do real good. Increasing the fleetwide average from roughly 30 m.p.g. today to 60 m.p.g. in the next 15 years, an ambitious but not implausible goal, could bring prices down by 20 percent.
Some politicians get it. Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, is drafting a bill that seeks to repeal $4 billion in annual taxpayer subsidies to the oil industry and use the proceeds to develop more efficient cars and alternative fuel sources. Mr. Obama has tried twice, without success, to get rid of those subsidies, and the House voted in March to preserve them in the current budget.
The tax breaks — fast write-offs for drilling expenses, generous depletion allowances, and the like — may have been useful years ago but are wholly unnecessary when oil prices and industry profits are reaching new highs.
Even John Boehner, the Republican leader, conceded in a recent ABC News interview that oil companies “ought to be paying their fair share.” When horrified aides reminded him that ending the subsidies would amount to a tax increase — anathema among Republicans — he backed off.
Repealing these breaks would reduce the deficit and yield revenues to be invested in cleaner fuels, while having no real impact on prices. Mr. Obama may not be able to persuade the House of these simple truths. But he can and must seize whatever opportunities are offered in the Senate, involving himself, not just rhetorically, in the hard but necessary struggle for a sane energy policy.
One Hand Clapping
Jobs data can be hard to read. When an economy is emerging from recession, a rising jobless rate can be a good sign if it reflects an increase in the people actively looking for work. Sadly, that was not the case with the April employment numbers reported on Friday. The jobless rate rose because the people who lost or left their jobs outnumbered those who found new work.
That does not diminish the boost from the increase of 244,000 jobs in April, but it does add perspective. Job growth is not taking off. At the current monthly rate, it would take more than five years to return to the pre-recession unemployment rate of 5 percent in December 2007.
What will it take to move the job market from weak to strong? For starters, it would require top policy makers to be asking that question and looking for answers. Instead, Congress and the White House are preoccupied with budget cutting, ignoring that more good jobs — which would create tax revenue and reduce spending on government aid — would be the best way to fight deficits.
They are also ignoring that a modicum of recovery has exposed deep pockets of distress. States and local governments are still shedding jobs. High school graduates under age 25 have had a jobless rate of nearly 22 percent in the past year. For young college graduates, the rate has been 9.6 percent, about the same as high school graduates over age 25. For black workers, unemployment was 16.1 percent in April, far higher than that of white workers. College-educated blacks are also more likely to be unemployed than their white peers. Among the jobless, 43.4 percent have been out of work for more than six months.
The fixation on the federal deficit has silenced talk of more fiscal stimulus. But more aid to states could help stanch job loss. Programs that create public-works jobs could be tailored to groups with high unemployment, and job re-training could focus on the long-term unemployed.
The sound of one hand clapping is what you hear when policy makers wave those kinds of ideas away.
Even John Boehner, the speaker of the House and Republican chieftain, didn’t bother to watch his party’s presidential debate on Thursday, and it’s hard to blame him. Only five candidates showed up, none with impressive followings. And what they said demonstrated why Republicans are having such a hard time delivering a coherent and appealing message ahead of the 2012 campaign.
One debater, former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, is at heart a moderate conservative but desperately tried to bare his teeth to appeal to the Tea Partiers who rule the primaries. Another, Rick Santorum, a former United States senator from Pennsylvania, is much further to the right than the independents who control the general election. Herman Cain, the former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, seemed to be running for Motivational Speaker of the United States rather than president, and two libertarian candidates were tuned only to their customized ideological frequencies.
The party’s heavyweights, such as they are, stayed home. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has not yet declared, perhaps because he is still refining his explanation of why he passionately opposes President Obama’s health care law though he implemented something very similar while governor. (His current line — that states can do what the federal government should not — is not likely to play well among the fierce partisans of the early primary states.) The other possibilities, including Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Mitch Daniels and Donald Trump, are either uncommitted to campaigning or are coyly waiting for the field to settle a bit.
Like a dark star, the Tea Party has pulled the entire Republican party rightward, and the vast distance between that star and the nation’s center has made it difficult to run for president. The slightest deviation calls down cosmic storms. When the sharp panel assembled by Fox News for the debate noted that Mr. Pawlenty had supported a cap-and-trade system in 2008 to limit greenhouse gases, there were gasps in the audience in Greenville, S.C. He practically sunk to his knees to apologize.
“I was wrong. It was a mistake,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
With the exception of the libertarians, the other candidates have had to trample over each other to stake out positions so tough-minded they often abandon common sense. Mr. Santorum defended his position that stopping “Obamacare” was more important than avoiding a federal default. Then he went a step further and said it was the most important issue facing the country, apparently writing off any of the 13.7 million people still unemployed.
At some point, the party will have to do better to make a race out of 2012. But that will only happen if a leader can pull Republicans away from the distant margins.
CUNY Shamed Itself
The trustees of the City University of New York got it exactly backward this week. They supported the political agenda of an intolerant board member and shunned one of America’s most important playwrights. They should have embraced the artist and tossed out the board member.
Much has been said about the importance of Tony Kushner. It’s true. His play “Angels in America” was a masterpiece that gave voice to the AIDS crisis. There also has been much talk about his precise words about Israel, and whether the trustee who blackballed him, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, got them right. That is all beside the point.
If Mr. Kushner were a lesser artist, it still would have been outrageous for CUNY to deny his honorary degree for political reasons. And the particulars of what Mr. Kushner said are not so important. (His comments were not all that remarkable, though we disagreed with them.) The point is that a public university is supposed to nurture free speech and free thought, not quash them.
The CUNY chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, should have spoken out forcefully on this issue. And Mr. Wiesenfeld, who told The Times’s Jim Dwyer that some Palestinians are not human, should resign.
Mr. Kushner, who is Jewish, described the ousting of Palestinians from their homes in the 1940s as a form of “ethnic cleansing.” He has also said Israel is engaged in the deliberate destruction of Palestinian culture. In a letter to CUNY, he said that he has always supported Israel’s right to exist and that Mr. Wiesenfeld distorted his views.
Benno Schmidt Jr., chairman of the CUNY board of trustees and a former president of Yale, voted to table the award for Mr. Kushner. He declared on Friday that this was a “mistake of principle” and called a meeting for Monday to see if CUNY could do the right thing, too.
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