Political Theatre - Part II

By Ron Beasley

Fester covered Obama's Bad Political Theatre below but over at US News Rick Newman takes on both of them (although he does beat up Obama a little more) in The Obama/McCain Energy Charade. He points out that Obama's plan to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will do nothing quickly while McCain's off shore drilling will take much longer to do nothing.  The real meat of the article appears at the end:

Cheap gas and energy independence are mutually exclusive. U.S. energy policy up till now has mainly been to keep gas prices low and consumers content. Artificially reducing gas prices would reverse trends that are actually helping to break our dependence on foreign oil. For the first time in years, for instance, Americans are driving less, not more. Gas consumption is going down. People are fleeing big sedans and SUVs in favor of right-size vehicles that get better mileage. More people are using mass transit. Those developments are direct responses to rising gas prices. If prices fall, Americans will go back to old habits, just as they did the last time gas prices skyrocketed and then fell after the oil shocks of the 1970s.

Costly gas may be the thing that breaks our oil addiction. With gas prices high and Americans clamoring for relief, automakers don't need McCain's $300 million incentive to build breakthrough cars: The market incentive is far greater. Whoever builds a fuel-saving plug-in hybrid—or any affordable car that runs on something besides fossil fuel—will reap billions in profit. But only if the conventional alternative—a gas-powered car—is expensive by comparison. If gas falls back to $2, the market for better hybrids, battery-electric cars, and hydrogen-fueled machines will quickly vanish. But nobody will blame the politicians.

He seems to agree with me that while painful high gasoline prices are good and necessary.  Whether they want to or not Americans are going to have to change their ways.  High gasoline prices are forcing that change in a way that may be painful but is survivable.