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8/5/2008
Burri: The Sierra Club feels our pain

They feel our pain. They share our suffering. In fact, they’re so sympathetic with Average Joe and his misery at the gas pump, they’re buying radio ads, urging Congress to Do Something: offer consumers “real relief at the pump.”

That’s right. In one of the more convoluted loads of cynically twisted politic-speech you’ll ever read, the Sierra Club is urging action on gas prices! President Bush, Big Oil’s backers in Congress, and shadowy outside groups are doing everything they can to push an agenda that will help pad Big Oil’s bottom line while denying consumers any real relief from pain at the pump. We are urging the public to tell Herb Kohl to stand strong and move the kind of legislation we need to end Big Oil’s chokehold on America’s economy, energy policy and politics once and for all. Big Bad Oil and high gas prices are hurting the American consumer! Oh my!

The Sierra Club, for those who don’t know, is an environmental group. A liberal, anti-business, pro-government, no-drilling, global-warming-alarmist, control human population and Save the Polar Bears environmental group.

As such, it’s obvious why they’d be taking this position on gas prices.

Oh, no, wait: it isn’t obvious.

Burning gasoline produces greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases cause global warming. Global warming is a fact, mostly caused by gas-burning automobiles.

And that’s bad.

Thus, as heroes of the environment, the Sierra Club ought to want higher gas prices, to force everyone to use less.

Evidence indicates that this does, in fact, work:

Secretary Peters said that Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) in May 2008 than in May 2007… marking a decline of 29.8 billion miles traveled in the first five months of 2008 than the same period a year earlier. This continues a seven-month trend that amounts to 40.5 billion fewer miles traveled between November 2007 and May 2008 than the same period a year before.

So. We’ve been driving less. Why do you suppose that is? What’s happened, the last few months, to cause such a decline?

Have we all suddenly decided Al Gore is right?

Here’s a hint: ha!

We’re Americans. We drive. We love driving. We love the freedom leaving when we want, going where we want, staying as long as we want and then leaving again without waiting for the train.

What could possibly come between us and this love? Money! We’re driving less because gas is so expensive. Imagine that.

And less driving means fewer emissions. Fewer greenhouse gases. Less ozone depletion, and less global warming, which is what the Sierra Club wants.

You’d think they’d have the guts to simply say: Long term, we’ll be better off. High gas prices are likes eating your vegetables, and going to the dentist, and cleaning the leaves out of your gutters. Icky and undesirable, but better for us in the long run.

But they don’t say that.

Now, in all honesty, this doesn’t mean the Sierra Club is betraying its values – because they aren’t really calling for cheaper gas. Oh, sure, they say they want cheaper gas. They say they want “action,” and “relief at the pump.” But the “actions” they ask for will, if they get them, have the opposite effect.

Basically: stick it to Big Oil. No more “giveaways to the oil industry.”

Given our government’s love for pork-barrel spending, I don’t doubt that “corporate handouts” to oil companies exist. Given the Left’s love of calling tax cuts and exemptions “corporate handouts,” I won’t doubt that we’re speaking different languages.

In either case, the result won’t be cheaper gas. Making the oil business more expensive won’t bring “relief at the pump.”

Oh, sure they talk about “investing in renewable energy,” too – anything but more nuclear power, I imagine. Regardless, that won’t reduce gas prices, either.

Bottom line: the Sierra Club knows what they want, and believes in what they want. But they aren’t honest about it.

If they were, they might still urge “action on gas prices.” But by that, they’d mean taking action to keep those prices high.

Lance Burri is a contributor to the Badger Blog Alliance and occasionally blogs at his own site as well.

COMMENTS

I guess they don't really understand supply and demand--world supply of oil is limited, so prices WILL be higher. Americans are just finally catching up to other parts of the world.

It amazes me that the same people that complain about Americans' arrogance in "grabbing Middle Easterners' oil" also seem to be against further oil drilling in /around the US. How else do they expect oil prices to drop?

Everyone should read "Sleeping with the Devil", which explains how truly grim the situation is--and how BOTH parties connive at it.

emily matthews (Tue Aug 05 09:59:35 2008)

Pain is a relative thing. The old adage in athletics is "You gotta play hurt."

But few of us are masochists. The simplest, cheapest and most effective way to avoid the hurt is to use less energy. Turn off the lights you aren't using. Get on the phone or the Internet instead of into your car to go shopping.

Ah, but Americans desperately want a miracle drug to fight the pain. And Congress and candidates, naively thinking Americans still believe them, desperately want to provide that miracle drug.

How about applying some witches' ointment to your hurt, like off-shore drilling? The Energy Information Administration says off-shore drilling could, in about 20 years, add about two-tenths of one percent to world oil production.

The effect on gas prices, according to the Energy Information Administration? "Insignificant."

Of course, using more oil would contribute to global warming, which would increase the demand for air conditioning, which would result in more burning of coal, raise fossil fuel prices and increase the hurt.

But that's business as usual. Forget business as usual, forget the Sierra Club, because the future will be a lot closer to Thornton Wilder's "By The Skin of Our Teeth" than to Mayberry RFD.

In a column in the Washington Post a couple months ago, James Howard Kunstler (author of "The Long Emergency") made the case that a radical change in lifestyle is the only course ahead for industrialized nations, and pretending otherwise will only hasten the inevitable and increase the pain.

Will they have to pry our cold dead hands off the steering wheel, or will we give up sooner? At $4 a gallon gas we're starting to loosen our grip. At $6 a gallon, I might trade in my V-8 Dodge Behemoth.

Kunstler says society can stave off, at least temporarily, the effects of petroleum depletion and climate change only by doing a series of politically unpopular things, things that aren't a subject of polite discussion, especially in an election year.

I thought of the lesson of "By the Skin of Our Teeth" as I pondered all this. That lesson basically is that we humans will persevere. I just wish we could do it with a little less whining about the Sierra Club and a little less hallucination about off-shore drilling.

When I finished pondering, I fired up my propane grill and roasted some shish kebabs. I'm part of the problem too.

Rich Eggleston (Tue Aug 05 10:29:05 2008)

Reduction in use does have a positive effect while we allow foreign concerns to dictate our input. This effect will be completly offset by our own drilling and use of American resources. So simple as to be so stupid, and worse yet, not employed.

Richard Parins (Tue Aug 05 22:46:11 2008)

I suppose allowing other countries, probably not exactly what you'd describe as "friendly" to the U.S., to dictate the way we live is a good thing if you're into more future pain and agony than you can stand.

Do you seriously believe that China and India are going to do anything to cut emissions of any kind, at least for many decades? Why do you think the Chinese are unable to cut the smog that hangs over Beijing, even with the government mandating that factories shut down and less vehicles are allowed on their streets? It's because the whole country is on a manufacturing roll and it's damn the emissions, full speed ahead.

What's required is that environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, stop whining and look at the whole picture instead of doing their best to send all our manufacturers out of the country by pushing ever more onerous rules and laws aimed at punishing them for........ manufacturing.

Our manufacturing companies have been working on cleaning up emissions for at least 40 years, perhaps longer. It happens to be a project that takes time.

Perhaps you haven't noticed that the global warming thing seems to have forsaken Wisconsin for the past year or so. We haven't even had air conditioning on this year. Yes, I'm a "flat-earther" or whatever it is liberals are describing those who don't believe in "global warming" as now.

We also turn off lights when we're leaving a room, recycle, compost, keep our thermostat at 68F. in winter and all those helpful things supported by environmental groups. We even take Jimmy Carter's advice and wear sweaters in the winter.

Drilling for oil and getting it up and on the market will lower prices. The price started on a downward trend as soon as the president said we must drill for oil. It has continued downward as many people have reduced their driving. This will last for just so long until we reach the point where driving, absolutely can't be cut any further.

People still have to go to work, they have to go see grandma who lives in Michigan and even a vacation to a place in Wisconsin uses gas.

Then gasoline is as cheap as it's going to get and the only way is up, because China and India will keep right on using oil and sooner or later Africa will join the fray. That leaves us with all our oil-saving measures already in place and the only way to go for our country is down.

Perhaps by that time we'll have all our solar panels, wind turbines and hydrogen cars in place. (By the way I'm in favor of all of the preceding.)

However, as of now the only way we can lower the price of oil is to drill for more oil and build more refineries along with other energy methods.

I've heard the "ten year" and "oil speculator" comments. Rather than the government interferring more into the marketplace than they aleady do, drilling for oil will make speculation go the other way which will lower the prices.

C.R. Stevenson (Fri Aug 08 10:29:29 2008)

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