Morons, your bus is leaving!

Matt Yglesias marvels at the perfidy of the Bush administration's push for drilling in ANWR. He very rightly points out that ANWR drilling will not solve our energy problems, for two simple reasons:

1. Since oil is sold on the world market, ANWR will be a tiny drop in the bucket, and thus won't change oil prices. Duh! Econ 101! (clenches fists in anger and screams) DUH!!!
2. Oh, and ANWR can't possibly deliver any oil for TEN YEARS. Duh!

(OK, the people in the cafe are looking at me funny. Moral: Don't read your blog out loud as you write.)

So, unless we assume that not only George Bush, but all of his advisors, as well as every conservative pundit and Fox News commentator, has an I.Q. low enough to make America rethink the value of eugenics, we must look for other reasons why Bush & co. continue to insist so heavily upon expanded drilling as the "solution" to our energy woes.

The reasons are not hard to find. First of all, obviously, it would mean profits for American oil companies, i.e. Bush's main corporate backers. Second - and in my view, more importantly - conservatives are still enraged that it was environmental concerns, not economics, that blocked ANWR drilling a few years back. Conservatives, like most people, hate being told what to do, especially if the people telling them what to do don't share their values. They tend to view environmentalists as crypto-communists who use cute animals as a front for soaking the rich. Sticking it to the greens is more important to conservatives than actually solving America's energy woes. That's why WaPo columnist Robert Samuelson, even when he finally grudgingly admits the need to develop energy alternatives, pointedly refuses to include solar power in his list.

If we're going to implement a serious alternative-energy policy, there's two ways to do it. The first is by somehow convincing conservatives that alternative energy is not a Trojan horse for socialism. The second is over conservatives' dead bodies.

P.S. - Can you name the movie I took the title of this post from? It's one of my all-time favorites.

P.P.S. - Know how I'm always saying that the best way to stop global warming is to "make solar cheaper than coal"? Apparently, this is such a well-known and well-accepted goal in the tech industry that the Google founders have given it a nerdy nickname: "RE < C" ("Renewable energy cheaper than coal"). This is now the goal of their Google.org energy fund. Great minds think alike. And so does mine.