Republicans believe that we should let the market figure out the future of energy. Will we run out of oil? Can wind and solar make the difference? Is nuclear a viable option? Ultimately, entrepreneurs, inventors, and speculators will tell us. The government’s job is to think seriously about the rules, particularly the environmental rules.
Democrats see the future in more apocalyptic terms. They see the future as a question of saving the planet: from pollution, from Big Oil, from global warming.
So it is healthy that there is a big battle brewing in this election over the energy future. That means that the American people get to choose. Do they want to prepare for a future in which fossil fuels will be absent, and a radical reorientation of the economy will be necessary to stave off disaster? Or can we rely on the price signals of the market?
Right now, both parties are playing politics with energy. With Republicans running a Drill, Drill, Drill campaign, Democrats are willing to let their vulnerable members vote for drilling. They figure they can afford to wait, and then come back next year with a comprehensive energy policy that is long on conservation and wind and solar.
Republicans think that Democrats are just wrong, that all the apocalyptic rhetoric is just wrong. We think that Democrats and politicians are just giving in to their natural instinct to call for the moral equivalent of war.
The thing about the future is that nobody knows nothing. You can do all the predictin’ and prophesyin’ you like. But the future will turn out to be different.
That’s why Republicans prefer to let businessmen and speculators make the bets on the future. If they are wrong, then they get to pay, at least in part, for their mistakes.
In politics it is different. In politics it doesn’t matter if you are wrong, so long as you can successfully point the finger at someone else. If our Democratic and environmentlist friends are wrong about “peak oil” and global warming, it will be the American people that will pay for their mistakes.
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