Gas Attack
Review and Outlook
Copyright 2000 Wall Street Journal
March 28, 2000
The internal combustion engine may be enjoying the last laugh. In his
1992 manifesto "Earth in the Balance," the father of the Internet declared
the internal combustion engine to be a graver threat to civilization than
war, and proposed to starve the beast through a global tax on fossil fuels
until such time as we realized the "strategic goal" of "completely
eliminating" it altogether.
Cut to election year 2000, a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries in Vienna this week and prices threatening to break the
$2/gallon barrier at the pump. Mr. Gore's green dream is becoming a
political nightmare, especially with the Vice President on record as
opposing two things that might ease the crunch: a rollback of government
taxes and the kind of regulations that discourage domestic production.
Mr. Gore, recall, cast the tie breaking vote on the 4.3-cents a gallon
increase in the gas tax, which some Republicans would now like to repeal.
And he also stands against repealing the prohibition against drilling on
what may be America's largest repository of oil: the 19-million-acre Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. On Friday Mr. Gore attacked GOP proposals to
allow drilling in the barren Arctic as an effort "to enrich their friends
in the oil industry." Refusing to lift the ban on drilling and the other
regulatory disincentives for domestic production, of course, only
strengthens OPEC's grip over the U.S. economy.
If we are to take Mr. Gore and his friends at their word, that may be
just what they want. Presumably, in their world, after people are forced to
spend $50 a week to fill up two family cars,they'll scream uncle and sign
onto a U.N. protocol and tax that would kill off cars and create a
groundswell for mass transit.
As we know from Mr. Gore, consumption itself is a sickness. Indeed,
though he concedes that energy is the "lifeblood of economic progress," you
don't hear much talk about "lifeblood" for progress in green circles.
Instead, we hear about our "addiction" to oil, our unhealthy obsession with
"consumption," our mad compulsion to take, as Mr. Gore describes, "larger
and larger quantities every year of coal, oil, fresh air and water, trees,
topsoil and the thousand other things we rip from the crust of the
earth."
Missing in the equation of this bedrock Gore constituency are people.
The internal combustion engine, for example, does not go on its own. It
requires operators and owners: the independent truck drivers whose
livelihood is threatened by rising fuel costs; the working family that
needs two cars to commute to and from their jobs; even the single mom who
needs not only to work, but to ferry her children to their own
appointments. Suburban soccer moms do not generally arrive by light rail.
In Mr. Gore's world, rising gas prices are thought to punish greedy SUV
owners while miraculously passing over the Ordinary Joes whose cars may be
even more important to their lives and livelihoods.
But Ordinary Joes do not figure much in green equations. Instead, the
Greenpeace site warns us that "polar bears are starving, walrus and caribou
populations are declining, and the Arctic ice pack is melting away." The
Public Interest Research Group's site says it is concerned for the
red-throated loon and the calving patterns of Porcupine River Caribou. The
only people whose livelihoods get mentioned are the Gwich'in Indians, whom
the Sierra Club tells us are "a 20,000 year old native culture" whose
"traditional way of life" would be jeopardized by oil development.
Never mind, as Louisiana's Democratic Senator John Breaux points out,
that oil and gas have been developed off natural reserves in Louisiana
without any environmental harm, and the same could be done in Alaska. It is
consumption itself that is the enemy. It's hard to escape the conclusion
that Mr. Gore and his activist allies really would like for us all to live,
more or less, like the Gwich'in Indians.
Mr. Gore's answer is to press Detroit for higher miles per gallon,
imposing whatever taxes on fuel it may take to get there. But surely that's
the point. It is hardly a coincidence that the kind of future Mr. Gore
envisions is, as his own solutions suggest, impossible without a heavy
government hand. In fat times, of course, calls for upping gas taxes and
restricting where oil companies might explore and what they might do may
seem idealistic and visionary. But when that weekly visit to the corner
Amoco station begins to bite more deeply into the family finances, people
begin to see for themselves the costs involved.
In the long run, says Mr. Gore and his friends, we'll all be better off
with more efficient cars and alternative fuels. Maybe. In the meantime, if
you're a mom with a vanload of kids, you're stuck. As with the infamous
remark by a certain Queen of France on the eve of the revolution, "let them
move back into the cities and take mass transit" does not strike us as a
persuasive rallying theme -- least of all for a man whose official Web page
advertises him as "a champion of working families."
Working families? Already in trouble with United Auto Workers President
Steve Yokich for agreeing to China's entry into the World Trade
Organization, an Al Gore whose spiritual mission it is to deliver America
from the internal combustion engine is not likely to prove popular among
auto workers in states such as Michigan come November. In fact, just what
is the presumed connection between Al Gore's politically correct politics
and these blue-collar types? They drive gas-hogging trucks out across dirt
roads into the woods, where they use guns to shoot birds and deer. Even the
Christian Right, which only wants not to have to hear people accepting
Oscars on behalf of abortion, isn't this far off the PC charts.
Indeed, the closer we look at Mr. Gore's prescription for the future,
the more we see the failure of the past. The last time America was menaced
by OPEC we had Jimmy Carter, with his odd and even rationing days at the
pump. When Ronald Reagan entered office he broke OPEC's back not by
declaring war on it, but by freeing up the U.S. energy sector to allow U.S.
companies to compete and innovate.
Up to now the luxury of a booming economy has allowed Mr. Gore to
indulge his greenest thoughts, whether signing onto U.N. environmental
protocols or raising gas taxes to subsidize alternative utopias. Clearly
he's got the Greenpeace vote -- and just maybe the Gwich'in Indians. But
we'll see if he's as popular with ordinary Americans after they've had a
long, hot summer of $1.50+/gallon at the gas pump, while Mr. Gore
resolutely seals off oceans of oil in the Arctic.
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