DLC Position on Energy...

[SaveElmer]

<snip>
Three years of volatility in global and domestic oil prices also have reminded us of the critical strategic as well as economic implications of our oil dependence. Unfortunately, the debate to date has focused primarily on America's dependence on foreign oil. This has led to specious calls for "energy independence" that miss the point about what that concept really means, as best exemplified by the dead-end debate over drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The real issue that we must address is the need to diminish the role of oil -- regardless of its origin -- in our economy. Whether we secure it from any corner of the globe market or from every nook and cranny of the United States, oil will continue to be a strategic and economic liability until we reduce our need for it. Instead of trying to address our oil dependence primarily by expanding supply, we must achieve a better balance of increasing the efficiency with which we consume oil while maintaining our supply base.
<snip>


<snip>
Although our long-term energy needs are likely to increase as our economy grows, our dependence on oil need not. To simultaneously achieve our economic and energy security goals, we need a suite of new and enhanced policies to: increase and encourage oil use efficiency and conservation; invest in technologies that offer alternatives to oil; support environmentally responsible domestic production; and encourage diversification of international productive capacity.

<snip>

http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=116&subsecID=155&contentID=250158

[longship]

1. Well, DUH!!

Who could imagine a revolutionary principle like saving energy?

Sounds like Democratic Party position to me. It certainly didn't take a DLC to come up with that.

[SaveElmer]

3. Republicans certainly can't seem to get there...

More oil, and again more oil...that is their mantra...

Read the whole article and a couple others on that site...some good ideas there.

[Greyhound]

2. Excellent. Now we need to see the plan. n/t

[jsamuel]

4. I don't think we will see that until August 2008

[carnie_sf]

5. Wow

I agree with the DLC on something

[newswolf56]

6. This is one instance in which both parties have not merely failed...

America but have in fact betrayed and condemned every American outside the relatively few very fortunate residents of a very few cities -- betrayed all the rest of us into the ruinous prison of ever more destructive, ever more restrictive transportation costs. I say this as someone who has covered transportation off-and-on through four decades and therefore knows the ugly truth that BOTH PARTIES have been inordinately hostile to the development of adequate public transport in America, with the result that we have the most expensive, least efficient and most viciously discriminatory transportation system in the industrial world. Thanks to skyrocketing fuel prices, even bus fares are already rising.

While it is true the Democrats have at least been the party of ideas in this matter -- the Republicans flatly oppose public transportation as a subsidy to the poor (according to the GOP's demonize-the-poor ideology, adequate mass transport wantonly encourages poverty) -- not since the LBJ years has the Democratic Party demonstrated any real commitment to building effective public transport.

Local prejudice plays a big role in this too. For example, in Seattle -- a Democratic stronghold -- the Democratic establishment prefers stinky slow buses not merely because it pleases their financiers in Big Oil and Big Automotive but mostly because of xenophobia: "we don' wanna be like New York" -- xenophobia so vicious and so extreme, construction of a light rail system is seven years behind schedule due entirely to deliberate political sabotage by bureaucrats and brahmans.

Nor is ignorance any excuse. The Seattle Democrats know as well as anyone that the key to building public transport use is speed and efficiency: but they persist in favoring buses and a system so moronically scheduled so that it takes three bus rides and two hours to go someplace you can reach via automobile in 20 minutes.

Rail is the only answer. Not only is it fast and efficient (and exempt from traffic jams), it runs on electricity and is therefore an uplifted finger to the Oil Barons. But rail systems weren't built when the money was there to build them, and now they will never be built.

The excuse of public hostility is equally invalid: during the temporary fuel crises of the '70s -- this one is permanent (and terminal) -- there was widespread enthusiasm for building public transport throughout the nation, close to 80 percent if I remember the polls correctly. But this was never mobilized into a program of action.

Adequate (electric powered) public transport (on rails) would have ended our dependence on foreign oil once and for all, but now it is too late, because since the Reagan Administration, the money to build the requisite infrastructure has never again been part of the public treasury -- and in any case, the land-acquisition and construction costs are now so inflated, they are eternally out of reach of even the most lavishly funded governments. Hence U.S. public transport is now inescapably doomed to become ever more like that in the Third World -- slow, rickety, stinky, ever-more-unaffordable buses. The chickens -- or more accurately the petro-vultures -- are merely coming home to roost: forever.



Edit: clarification of lead sentence.

[SaveElmer]

9. Really good points there...

It does certainly seem as though there is little political will for public transportation, which needs to be a major part of any energy solution...even among Democrats....

What I find more objectionable is the Republican stonewalling of improved CAFE standards...if there is a more blatant sop to big industry I can;t think of it (except perhaps the Bush suck up to big oil)

[Just Me]

7. Two attacks on the DLC on the first page. You're talented!!! n/t

[Greyhound]

8. I thot elmer agreed with the DLC on guns. n/t

[paineinthearse]

10. SaveElmer is on a roll

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